Information Guide

Results

Better connectivity at a lower price

Travis contrasts NetApp’s new multi-hop FCoE with the traditional approach to this

challenge, which is to add new layers of network to existing Ethernet.

“Instead of building up a new layer of network to deliver FC and FCoE connectivity I was

able to connect them through the existing Nexus 7000 switches, and I didn’t have to buy

additional switches to do it,” Travis says. “We were able to consolidate without affecting

the best practices we’d put in place for our LAN and SAN.” Travis was able to isolate the

LAN and SAN and put SAN into a storage virtual device context (VDC) by logically splitting

each Cisco Nexus 7000.

In addition, the capability of the Cisco Nexus 5000 and Nexus 7000 switches helped

enable Travis to avoid purchasing two new SANs (one Fabric A and one Fabric B) and

approximately 12 SAN switches. “In the end, Cisco enables me to do more than just deliver

Multihop FCoE,” says Travis. “It also provides end-to-end FCoE with FCoE storage. Having

a Cisco Unified Fabric means an integrated model that supports FCoE from the UCS Blade

Servers through the Nexus Series Switches all the way to NetApp storage controllers.”

Smaller footprint and manageability yields cost savings

With the options provided through the Cisco environment, Travis’s team was able to deploy

the new connectivity faster and less expensively than he expected. NetApp has saved

approximately $300,000 in initial hardware costs by not having to buy additional switches

and other technologies.

“It’s easy to focus on capital cost, but typically ongoing operational and installation costs

are more significant,” says Travis. “We saved about 100 hours on the initial work of cabling

and setup. Plus, because you can do this in a single environment without getting more

switches or running different networks for it, you can manage it more easily, so we save

approximately one-third of a full-time employee’s time.”

Power, heating, and cooling are also part of the savings. The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series

Switches connect over a Twinax cable, which uses a tenth of the power of an optic

cable. And with the Cisco Unified Fabric, Travis does not need to run multiple adapters

in the Cisco UCS servers.

Network agility supports business agility

The agility of the Cisco infrastructure supports NetApp’s need for business agility, because

it responds to changing market conditions and innovative new directions from its staff. Travis

sees that agility coming from both the computing and networking aspects of the Cisco

infrastructure. “The way that FCoE solves changing needs for storage connectivity is similar

to the way UCS provides a dynamic solution to compute challenges,” says Travis. “Both

UCS and FCoE reduce the number of management points and provide easy scalability

so that we can quickly tap into both computing and storage resources, wherever and

whenever we need them.”