Case Study 2
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The largest electricity producer in a central African country with presence in all states of the country.
The client has an on-premise datacenter with hosted Netapp storage and obsolete servers and network devices all operating in silos looking to transition their datacenter to support 21st century needs, host hundreds of applications and collapse all the silos into a single datacenter infrastructure.
Southgate Technologies Limited was contacted to help the company in this complex transition to a more agile IT process where the siloes of storage, compute and network are merged into one singular solution. Netapp’s Flexpod Converged Infrastructure (comprising Cisco Network, Netapp Storage, Cisco Compute and Microsoft Virtualization technology) had been purchased and Southgate was brought in on a professional services basis for implementation.
Our implementation approach involved: 1) breaking down the converged infrastructure into its different components (compute, storage, network, virtualization and management) to design and implement 2) coupling all the different component together 3) testing the assembled infrastructure based on acceptable parameters developed with the client.
The network section consisted of the Cisco Nexus 5548UP switch, compute section consisted of Cisco UCS B200 M4 blade servers, Virtualization consisted of Microsoft’s Hyper-V, management of Cisco UCS Director and Netapp storage.
- Lesser heat and power consumption since all the individual siloes now work together as a single unit not separately and on a more of
- Less cabling due to cisco’s unified architecture that combines both Lan and San traffic on same cable instead of the usual separation.
- Faster access to applications since all the interfaces was 10Gb/s switching architecture which was a significant upgrade from the prior 1Gb/s and Nexus’ NX-OS superior QoS implementation and lossless connectivity.
- Multi-tenancy: the datacenter was built with the ability to segment different sections for traffic isolation and segmentation and so if issues arrive from applications deployed in the test and development environment it doesn’t affect the core traffic.
- All of these ultimately lead to faster and more agile business processes and satisfaction for clients and higher profit margins.