University of Bern and ifolor Opt for Cisco UCS

Cisco Systems, Inc launched two
years ago its Unified Computing System (UCS) and has now more than 11,000
customers WW.

At the end of last year, Cisco secured Kreuzlingen-based
photography and print service provider ifolor AG as its
100th UCS customer in Switzerland and named the University of Bern as its 150th UCS
customer soon afterward, at the beginning of March this year. Since then, the
total number of Cisco UCS customers in Switzerland has reached more than 200.

The University of Bern relies on Cisco UCS servers to handle growing data volumes. The servers were installed within three days, with
assistance from Netcloud
AG, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, and offer the following advantages:

• Quick installation and intuitive control with no training costs
• Optimized operating costs due to simplified administration
• Scientific projects accelerated through centralized management Using Cisco UCS,
  124 virtual machines on six physical servers store data from the university’s
  40 institutes and research groups.

The virtual machines provide 18TB of storage space and 1.5TB of memory. All
of the system’s components are coordinated with virtualization solutions from
VMware and storage from HDS.

Simon Stahelin, virtualization manager at the University of Bern, praises the
solution: "System operation is
absolutely reliable, and it runs faster than our previous solutions. We’re
particularly impressed with the centralized management, which significantly
simplifies administration."

ifolor handles large volumes of data with Cisco UCS Customers of ifolor deliver
the majority of their photos in digital format, which results in large and
fluctuating volumes of data.

Thanks to the Cisco solution, ifolor now has an efficient and stable
infrastructure offering the following benefits:

• Flexible capacity scaling for seasonal peaks
• Online ordering services available at all times
• Images processed and stored ifolor utilizes two redundant Cisco UCS
  domains in two separate data centers.

Each domain contains six Cisco UCS B230 M2 Blade servers with a total of 24
CPUs. The Cisco UCS servers enable the maximum possible stability for the
network. Together with storage and data management from NetApp and
virtualization solutions from VMware, they make up the FlexPod data center
solution.

The solution impressed Patrick Sontheim, head of infrastructure at ifolor:
"The FlexPod architecture provides
top performance and scaling with simple management. It allows images to be
processed and stored quickly, and the online ordering service is available at
all times,"

Christian Kupferschmid, CIO at ifolor, remarks and adds: "There were no problems with
integration and we are still very satisfied with our decision for CISCO UCS."