Leaflet

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“Since implementing
Cisco UCS solutions,
we’ve experienced zero
downtime through the
fault-tolerant infrastructure.
We now have the ability
to complete network
maintenance without
causing any downstream
interruption in service.”
— James Morris
Director of Network
Engineering and Operations
KORE Telematics
In addition to the urgent requirement for uptime, KORE must scale to meet escalating
demand with peak performance. Currently, KORE can sustain hundreds of thousands of
concurrent device data sessions across multiple networks and technology protocols with
the ability to handle millions of simultaneous connections as needed around the globe join
the KORE network every day. Traffic volumes are growing rapidly, and the network has been
built to scale to over 10 million devices.
As a corporation, KORE has 70 employees in Toronto, Melbourne, Atlanta, and Winnipeg,
fueling their productivity through business applications such as Microsoft Exchange and
SharePoint. The company has a rich development environment for its customer-facing
PRiSMPro software and associated APIs, used by KORE customers to create custom
solutions for managing their end-users, assets, and devices. The resulting databases and
applications are hosted in the KORE data centers.
To manage its tremendous growth, KORE began to reevaluate its existing data center
environment (39 traditional servers in a data center in Winnipeg) and realized the status quo
would not be a viable option long-term. The company’s busy IT team had to manage too
many physical servers, and they wanted to enhance the company’s backup and disaster
recovery (DR) capabilities in the event of a server failure.
Solution
KORE was looking for a better strategy for supporting new customer applications and
keeping the network online, all while simplifying IT and reducing costs. As part of its
efforts to transform its data center and network infrastructure, KORE embarked on a
comprehensive project to implement virtualization technologies and update server
hardware and network solutions.
After evaluating multiple vendors, the choice was clear: unify the data center with a Cisco
network built with Unified Fabric components and the Cisco Unified Computing System™
(UCS™), which brings together network, compute, storage access, and virtualization into
a single, cohesive system. Beyond offering superior performance and richer management
capabilities, Cisco® UCS solutions were 25-30 percent less expensive up-front and
tailored for virtualization. For instance, the extended memory capabilities of the Cisco
UCS C250 rack-mount servers would increase performance and capacity for KORE’s
demanding workloads, while integrated Cisco switches and routers support fast, secure,
and reliable networking.
“From technical and price standpoints, Cisco UCS won hands-down,” says Morris. “We
also appreciated the ability to work with a single vendor, one with exceptional technical
support, for both our network and data center solutions.”
Disaster recovery to enhance availability
Today, the company has two clusters of four Cisco UCS C250 rack-mount servers in the
United States, one in a Las Vegas data center facility and another in Atlanta, all connected
through a high-capacity Cisco network that leverages Cisco Catalyst® 3750-x and 6500
Series Switches and Cisco 7206 and Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers. Each data center
is virtualized to create a flexible, secure, private cloud. If an outage occurs in one facility,
the other facility automatically takes over to help ensure high availability, even in the event
of a disaster.