Cisco UCS at GIS data center

NEW DELHI: Grupo Industrial Saltillo (GIS) a Mexican industrial company based in the north of Mexico, has deployed Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) in its new data center and as a result, it has reduced operational costs and obtained better performance of its network.

The system is a set of pre-integrated data center components that creates a virtual server comprised of blade and rack servers, network adapters, fabric extenders, and interconnects, all of which are integrated under a common embedded management system.

GIS decided to develop their own data center and chose Cisco UCS. After the deployment, GIS has obtained significant improvements on its network performance. Cisco UCS helped them to migrate from 18 to 7 racks, therefore obtaining cost reductions including energy used, cooling space, equipment maintenance, and management.

The backup times using LAN become 8 times faster, access to storage improved 30%, and load of servers came from 70% to 10%. In general terms the company has an operation 40% lower than previously.

"The migration using virtual servers helped us to do a seamless transition; reducing space thus racks equipment and having countable benefits in its operation,” said Francisco Ramos, Project Infrastructure Manager from GIS.

"Customers are adopting UCS because our innovation drives positive business outcomes for them." said Rogelio Velasco, Vice-President of Cisco Mexico.

Cisco UCS, now used by over 41,000 customers worldwide, is the first data center platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture blade and rack-mount servers with networking and storage access into a single converged system.

GIS is a company with more than 6,400 employees working on five business units that manufactures and commercializes products for the automotive, construction, and houseware sectors. The company has production plans in five Mexican cities and commercial offices nationwide and in the United States.

Formerly to cover all its requirements for its international network, GIS rented space with a data center supplier. Close to the end of that contract and after an analysis about developing its own data center, according to the particular needs of their 1,500 IT users, GIS looked for an option that could help them to reduce at least 30% the IT operation.