Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches

Together, retail stores under the Ahold USA umbrella serve approximately 20 million customers each week. Effectively serving such a large number of customers requires efficient supply-chain management, including rapid dissemination of pricing, buying history and trends, promotions, and other sales and marketing information. The applications supporting these activities, while not mission-critical, are vitally important. In the competitive food retail business, any brief failure to react to customer preferences can cripple margins.

Ahold USA had its business applications distributed across six data centers. Some of the data centers were inherited from operating companies purchased over the years, resulting in several different standards and equipment. Ahold Information Services (AIS), the information technology (IT) arm of Ahold USA, is responsible for providing and supporting IT-related products and services to Ahold USA's family of companies. Headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, AIS employs 1200 people. To reduce support costs, AIS began a project to consolidate its six data centers to two, with the eventual goal of standardizing protocols and equipment across the entire organization.

AIS also maintained two storage area networks (SANs), one in Greenville and another in Boston, Massachusetts. As Ahold USA grew, so did its storage requirements, until AIS was managing 105 terabytes across 1000 servers with more than 85 Fibre Channel fabric switches. Managing and supporting so many switches became a costly burden. Adding a new switch required many hours of network planning, and each new switch only added to the management and support complexity. Further, the system of switches became increasingly inefficient-3 of the 12 ports on each switch were used for interswitch links. As part of the data center consolidation project, Ahold USA decided to undertake a SAN consolidation project as well, collapsing its SAN islands using director-class switches.

AIS also recognized the need to implement a cost-effective disaster recovery plan for many of its distributed applications. AIS had outsourced disaster recovery of mission-critical financial applications, at a cost of more than $70,000 a month. However, it was prohibitively expensive to extend that outsourcing to all applications. As a result, many other applications, including some supply-chain applications, were only backed up to tape. This meant any application failure could take days or even weeks to get back online. Midrange applications were not backed up at all. Although many applications are not deemed mission-critical, they are still essential to running a competitive retail operation. "Retail is different from other industries," says Chris Collins, senior manager, AIS Infrastructure Planning. "We don't have huge amounts of mission-critical information. At the same time, since we are so geographically dispersed, we are more dependent on tools like e-mail and marketing applications." To deploy a managed, outsourced disaster recovery solution for all applications would cost Ahold USA millions of dollars a year. Instead, AIS began looking for a solution that it could manage in house to mirror both mission-critical and midrange applications.

AIS began an evaluation of first-tier vendors in the storage networking industry. Cisco was not initially considered, despite being a supplier of networking equipment to Ahold USA. "We were initially hesitant to use Cisco because we saw them as a networking company who didn't know storage," says Collins. "But once we saw all the benefits networking technologies brought to the storage environment, we're now asking storage vendors what they know about networking."

After its initial reluctance, AIS was impressed with the modularity and scalability of the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of switching products. AIS acknowledged it could collapse the existing mesh of switches into an efficient configuration using a combination of Cisco multilayer director and multilayer fabric switches. AIS also appreciated the depth and breadth of management tools available with the Cisco MDS 9000 Family. "Cisco Fabric Manager software allows us to manage the fabric itself, see hot points, and the end-to-end traffic in the entire fabric," says Collins. "This level of functionality isn't available anywhere else in the SAN environment."

What tipped the balance in Cisco's favor was the Cisco MDS 9000 Family's integrated support for Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP). "We knew we needed FCIP from the beginning," says Collins. "With other vendors we considered, we would have had to build a whole separate fabric for IP traffic and segregate local traffic from traffic over the WAN. With Cisco, there is no extra equipment. We just call out the ports and manage IP traffic from the same tool."

"It was a very hard decision to migrate from our existing SAN switch environment to Cisco because of the large scope of the project," says Collins. "However, with effective planning and the support of Cisco's services group, the project was more than worth it. We had a positive return on investment from day one. That doesn't happen very often." By reducing the number of interswitch links, AIS calculates it will save $150,000 a year. Additional port provisioning is also much easier. Rather than agonizing over where a switch should go and changing network configurations, AIS can simply add more port modules to its Cisco MDS switches and configure them easily using Cisco Fabric Manager.

Owning and internally managing its own disaster recovery network also added up to significant savings. AIS calculates that it will save $432,000 a year after the initial capital investment, while replicating much more data than previously. This savings is over and above the significant savings in management and support of the storage network. "The most exciting piece for us is the cost-effective, in-house disaster recovery," says Collins. "We've got five more applications in the queue. All we have to do is add more storage, configure remote copy services, and it's up and running. This takes 15 minutes. Provisioning a disaster recovery circuit would take weeks."

With the advanced multiprotocol functionality enabled by the Cisco MDS 9000 Family, AIS is confident about the future of its storage network. "We'll continue to grow as our storage needs grow, and we plan to do that with our Cisco switches," Collins says.

In terms of new projects, AIS is considering attaching its mainframes to the Cisco storage network, as the Cisco MDS 9000 Family supports IBM Fiber Connection (FICON). The group is also interested in the virtualization technology integrated into the Cisco MDS 9000, which would allow it to create virtual SANs (VSANs) to separate open systems from mainframes to be attached in the future. "The Cisco MDS 9000 is an elegant solution enabling us to standardize our entire storage infrastructure on a common platform," says Collins.