Leaflet

“The key benefit of moving
to UCS is it allows us to do
one-off implementations.
It enables us to grow the
business, scale sideways,
and be flexible to what the
business is demanding
from us. It’s simply a
business enabler.”
Robert Sutton
IT Director
Customer Case Study
At that point, two things conspired to change the situation. The first was that the
business was concerned about having its IT systems housed at its headquarters, since
the location was also used for temporary storage of hazardous materials. The second
was that Suttons Group commissioned a study from its business advisers, KPMG, on
future business strategy, which recommended new IT infrastructure and systems to
support international growth.
These two considerations led to a decision to move the Suttons Group data center
to hosted facilities in London, more than 300 kilometers away. Although the move
represented an opportunity to update the infrastructure and overcome the IT problems
the Group was facing, it also presented a challenge. Previously, the IT team had been
able to attend to the data center hardware on site, but now they were worried about
being able to exercise the same level of control remotely.
Solution
Suttons Group had been consulting with Cisco over IP telephony and voice-over-
IP products. So when the time came to look for data center hardware providers
Cisco was included in a shortlist of three, and a demonstration of the Cisco Unified
Computing System™ (UCS®) was arranged. “I must admit, I had never looked at
Cisco as a computing vendor,” says Affy Bhatti, IT Infrastructure Manager, “but the
demonstration pretty much made up my mind. I was especially impressed with the in-
depth product knowledge of the Cisco systems engineer.”
Specifically, Cisco® UCS met the requirements for a blade system that could
be accessed remotely and would be fast and reliable, while a single point of
management was a major plus. Robert Sutton says: “In addition, it was the simplicity of
the system that impressed us the most. You configure once and it’s plug-and-play.”
But the clincher was FlexPod, a pre-designed and pre-validated base data center
configuration combining technologies from Cisco and NetApp. With the design
available in two options, Suttons deployed VMware vSphere (for back-end operations)
and Citrix XenDesktop (for desktop virtualization). “A proven technology by the
vendors I most wanted to work with: that was the real big seller,” says Bhatti.
The solution was designed and implemented by CAE. As well as providing ongoing
management and IT helpdesk support, the Cisco partner is also playing a key role in
optimizing the company’s disaster recovery arrangements.
Suttons procured a standard FlexPod design for high availability. Along with NetApp
FAS 2240, the design incorporates two Cisco Nexus® 5548 Series Switches, Cisco
Catalyst® 3750 Series Switches, Cisco Nexus 2248 Fabric Extenders, ACE Application
Control Engine Modules for load balancing, and two Cisco ASA 5520 Series Adaptive
Security Appliance firewalls.
It also contains five UCS chassis, eight UCS B250 M2 Blade Servers with 192GB of
RAM, and 16 UCS B200 M2 Blade Servers, connected to two NetApp high-availability
storage units via a 10Gbps link. Virtualization is via a VMware vSphere and Citrix
XenServer, supporting Windows Server 2008 R2. The B200 blades support core
Suttons Group applications that require physical hardware, but around 95 percent of
the data center infrastructure is virtualized.
“We are trying to stay away from physical hardware because it does not allow you
to be scalable on the fly,” says Bhatti. Suttons Group runs SQL and Oracle as well
as Microsoft Office applications, and has now transitioned its data center to FlexPod,
decommissioning its older equipment except for one backup server. The Cisco
equipment is covered by a Cisco SMARTnet® service contract.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 4