Cisco Systems optical transport and storage area network
(SAN) technology solutions are being deployed to help improve the
management and resilience of HP's business and mission-critical
data throughout the company's European operation.
Cisco and HP are working to provide a resilient and robust data
management service to the latter’s new and existing customers based
on the new optical and SAN infrastructure.
The collaboration aims to develop and deliver integrated
solutions to help customers implement intelligent building, IP
Communications (IP Telephony and IP Contact Centre), network
management, network services and support, mobility and wireless,
and network storage.
HP Services is using the Cisco equipment to link its two
European data centres - which are 84 km apart - at Grenoble and
Isle d'Abeau in France.
The highly resilient network infrastructure supports more than
41 terabytes of data and distributed applications running across
more than 250 HP ProLiant servers.
According to HP, the overall solution is five times more
cost-effective than extending the storage capacity of existing data
centres.
At its two European data centres, HP deployed the Cisco ONS 15540
dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical transport
platform to provide the high-capacity link between the data centres
with Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches and Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer SAN
Directors. This helps maximise network uptime at both data
centres.
"As part of its pan-European data centre consolidation effort, HP
determined that expanding capacity in France and networking two
data centres was a better proposition than physically expanding one
of the data centres," said Patrick de Marcillac, European
infrastructure manager, HP.