Schneider Electric U.S. built highly scalable and available data center using Data Center 3.0 solutions.
Business Challenge
An energy management specialist with operations in more than 100 countries, Schneider Electric offers integrated solutions for energy and infrastructure, industrial processes, building automation, and data centers. The company has more than 130 business entities and 114,000 employees.
Schneider Electric is currently consolidating more than 2000 applications into a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. The existing data centers in North and South America did not have room for the new servers, so the company decided to build a consolidated data center in St. Louis, Missouri. "An enormous amount of traffic will be traveling over the network to the same place, so we needed fast wire speed and high availability," says a senior member of Schneider Electric's network management team. "In fact, the data center network would be critical to the success of the application consolidation project."
Solution and Results
The new Schneider Electric Technology Center in St. Louis uses Cisco® Data Center 3.0 solutions for switching, load balancing, storage access, and WAN optimization. "We chose the Cisco solution because it will scale for any projects we can foresee during the lifetime of the data center, and at less cost than older technology," says the network manager
The new data center core network is built on a pair of Cisco Nexus 7000 Switches, which connect to a pair of Cisco Nexus 5000 Switches at the end of each row. The Cisco Nexus 5000 Switches connect directly to about thirty 10 Gigabit Ethernet servers used for the ERP application, and to Gigabit Ethernet servers by way of redundant Cisco Nexus 2000 Switches at the top of each rack. Cisco ACE Application Control Engines provide load balancing for the ERP application. Later the IT department will use the same equipment to load-balance other applications, by taking advantage of Cisco ACE Application Control Engine virtualization capabilities. Schneider Electric is currently implementing Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), which accelerates application performance over the wide area network.
The main business benefits of the Cisco Data Center 3.0 solution include:
• Capital cost avoidance: Using Cisco Data Center 3.0 solutions instead of the company's previous data center solutions reduced upfront capital costs by 15 percent, or $100,000. One source of cost savings is the high port density of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Switch, which reduced the number of core switches needed by half. Another is the top-of-rack architecture for connecting Gigabit Ethernet servers.
• Simplified cable management: Using the top-of-rack Cisco Nexus 2000 Switches for server aggregation also saves significant time effort and money on cabling and cable management. Schneider Electric will save more on cabling when it finishes upgrading its servers with converged network adapters (CNAs). Then the company will consolidate to a unified fabric carrying both data and storage traffic, saving more on cabling. The Cisco Nexus 5000 will direct data traffic to the core and storage traffic to the existing Cisco MDS 9513 Multilayer Switch used for storage access.
• Low operational costs: All Cisco Nexus data center switches use the same operating system, NX-OS. It resembles the Cisco IOS® Software closely enough that the IT department learned to use it without formal training.
• Simplified company acquisitions: Rather than purchasing a separate Cisco Nexus 7000 core switch for business entities that need to remain separate for security reasons, such as government contracting, the IT group can use the virtual device context (VDC) feature of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Switch to create a separate virtual switch. Integrated roles-based access control enables the IT department to control which personnel in every entity can access a particular VLAN.
• Preparation for new business requirements: "With the Cisco Nexus platform, we expect to be able to handle our planned move to virtualization, as well as any other data center requirements, with our existing equipment or a simple modular upgrade," says the network manager. "We anticipate no major upgrades for the lifetime of the data center. We prepared for the future at today's prices."
The network manager concludes, "We took advantage of everything that Cisco can offer, resources as well as technology, and are experiencing huge rewards as a result. We prepared for future growth, and we did it by paying less than we would have with older technology. I attribute that to the collaboration with our Cisco team and implementation partner, Logicalis."
