Leaflet

Easy path to virtualization

The migration to a virtualized infrastructure was smooth and fast, a vital factor for a

company whose customers cannot tolerate outages. Using the Cisco UCS platform,

an EMC SAN, and VMware virtualization software, KORE started by consolidating 39

production servers in Winnipeg into virtual machines running on four physical servers in

Las Vegas. This consolidation took only 96 hours and resulted in less than two hours of

overall downtime.

“We migrated to four Cisco servers in Las Vegas and synchronized our EMC storage-

area networks (SANs), moving them across the Internet in a virtual move of a virtual data

center, including moving all of our customers’ applications,” says Morris. “It was genuinely

remarkable how easy and fast it was to implement the combined Cisco UCS, EMC, and

VMware solutions.”

Results

Superb service levels for customers

With the new unified data center infrastructure and Cisco UCS Manager, KORE now has

the ability to perform system maintenance without affecting customer connections. The

combination of technologies from Cisco, EMC, and VMware has created a highly available

and scalable computing environment for KORE. And, although disaster recovery and

redundancy are now built-in, KORE has never experienced downtime or server failures

since implementing its Cisco Unified Data Center solution two years ago, a crucial factor

in supporting customers’ mission-critical M2M communication needs.

In the event of a disaster, KORE IT can now respond within minutes, helping to ensure

critical systems are back online within a two-hour window, and the self-healing nature of

UCS technology marginalizes the impact to network availability. “Since implementing Cisco

UCS solutions, we’ve experienced zero downtime through the fault-tolerant infrastructure,”

says Morris. “We now have the ability to complete network maintenance without causing

any downstream interruption in service.”

Low TCO

For KORE, additional benefits of using Cisco UCS as the computing foundation for its

virtualized and unified data center environment include lower power consumption and

cooling requirements due to a significantly reduced physical server count. The servers

are easy to manage as well, contributing to lower overhead and maintenance. Cisco UCS

Manager provides centralized, embedded management of all Cisco UCS software and

hardware components to simplify managing resources for hundreds or even thousands

of virtual machines. A small staff of five engineers spread across locations worldwide can

manage two data centers, including 20 TB of storage and dozens of applications and virtual

machines, without being on-site in Atlanta or Las Vegas.

“The management tools Cisco provides give us alerting and key performance indicators

so we can keep a real-time pulse on our network and overall data center performance,”

says Morris. “Our team can even connect to physical servers virtually to see what’s

happening. That kind of intelligence has a huge impact on lowering our costs and

simplifying management for our dispersed IT organization.”