EVRY protects SAN investment, expands Capabilities

EVRY chooses Cisco MDS 9710 to adapt easily to emerging and future customer demands. EVRY provides IT services to businesses, financial institutions, national public sector entities, municipalities, and health authorities in Norway and other Nordic countries.

EVRY’s virtualization deployments are expanding rapidly and customers deploying more applications placed higher demands on storage environments. EVRY’s requirements include 16-Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity without oversubscription, high reliability storage environment and the system had to support switching for 12 petabytes of storage on more than 100 storage arrays. Of course it had to be easy to manage as they have a very small team.

EVRY chose Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director switches for their SAN core. The new systems were delivered and supported by Cisco storage partner EMC.

Highlights of business challenges faced by EVRY:

Meet increasing demand for high performance
Keep SAN infrastructure as simple as possible
Minimize management requirements
Build in high scalability to meet future demands

“We like to keep our infrastructure simple, because soon each administrator will be responsible for approximately 800 terabytes of storage,” says Jo Marius Pedersen, SAN administrator for EVRY. “We wanted to continue with Cisco, because we’ve had outstanding reliability. We performed a field trial of Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director switches, and it was easy. It was like testing one of our 9500 switches, just supercharged, which was exactly what we hoped for.”

Network Solution

EVRY plans to consolidate numerous data centers to three. Several existing EVRY data centers rely on dual Cisco MDS 9500 Series Fibre Channel fabrics. Each SAN fabric includes 18 Cisco Multilayer Director switches. Four new Cisco MDS 9710 switches have been added to these fabrics with plans for expansion. The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Directors layer a comprehensive set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric. They share the same operating system and management interface with other Cisco data center switches, so they are easy to integrate. As a result, EVRY maintains a unified fabric with high-performance Fibre Channel connections.

The new solution exceeded EVRY’s requirements. They delivered high performance, simpler management, and flexibility. EVRY also uses Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) for managing its SAN switches.

“We really like the graphical user interface and enhanced display features,” says Pedersen. “It’s easy to see fabric health and other attributes at a glance.”

Results

Gained high, predictable performance
Retained high reliability while increasing scalability
Protected SAN switching investment

The Cisco MDS 9710 gives EVRY the flexibility that it will need to easily meet future requirements without disrupting the installed infrastructure, cable plant, or IT processes. EVRY’s SAN team was already comfortable with Cisco equipment and management tools, so learning the capabilities of the new systems was easy. And managing them is easy with the Cisco DCNM graphical interface.

Bottom line

The Cisco MDS 9700 delivers the high performance that EVRY needs today, with the scalability to grow, no matter how unpredictable customers’ needs become. The new Cisco MDS 9700 Director provides up to 384 ports of 16-Gbps Fibre Channel switching. Switching power delivers 16-Gbps line-rate, non-blocking, predictable performance across all traffic conditions for every port in the chassis. The Cisco MDS 9700 also supports high availability. All major components are redundant, including the fabric card. Non-disruptive software upgrades and state-full failover let EVRY keep customers’ services up and running, no matter what. With this kind of scalability, EVRY has the flexibility to support growing customer deployments with high database processing requirements.

Keeping things simple pays off for EVRY’s SAN team. And the Cisco MDS switches combine simplicity with power and reliability for the future.

For more info