SENAI Santa Catarina Deploys Cisco Unified Computing System Solution

Virtualization Aims to Streamline Data Center Operations

SAO PAULO, Brazil, April 26, 2011 – Cisco announced today that SENAI Santa Catarina, an industrial training institute, has deployed the Cisco Unified Computing System^TM. The investment came from the need to expand the institution’s server farm to meet the growing information technology demands in the professional education sector. The new system will support the 35 SENAI branches in the state of Santa Catarina, which employ more than 3,000 staff members and enroll 100,000 students annually, both on-site and through e-learning modality studies.

The great differential of the solution is the rapid provisioning of services, enabled by features of the Cisco Unified Computing System that integrate the environments of local area and storage networks, reducing complexity in the data center environment.

According to Paulo Alberto Violada, the IT coordinator at SENAI Santa Catarina, the time required for the provisioning of services will be reduced from eight hours to one, and preventive maintenance can be handled during business hours, without interruption or degradation of service quality.

The solution has brought other gains, such as increased speed of communication in the data center through integration of the Cisco Unified Computing Center and the Cisco Nexus® 5000 platform, the ease and simplicity of the computing environment, and the reduction in energy consumption, estimated at 18 percent.

Even with all the complexity inherent in data centers and the need to install the solution without stopping the service, the installation was a success. “One of the reasons for adoption of the Cisco Unified Computing System was the ability to attack all items of complexity with a unified solution,” said Rafael Silva, project manager of Teltec Networks, a Cisco Premier Certified Partner, responsible for designing and selling the solution.

According to Marco Antonio Dociatti, director of the SENAI Santa Catarina, “being an early adopter means putting trust in a manufacturer like Cisco.” The main goal is to expedite service to all audiences. “The changes are being made to provide a market differentiator in serving our customers,” Dociatti added.

The commercial director at Cisco Brazil, Marco Sena, was confident about the results. “After the final phase of installation,” he said, “we believe that this project represents an innovative and successful case for Cisco as well as Teltec.”

Technical details of the solution:

Equipment purchased and its features:

Cisco UCS B-Series (B200 M2) servers were used to virtualize the data center. The rate achieved was approximately 7:1 (seven physical servers virtualized on a single Cisco Unified Computing System server).

The solution implements VN-Link technology (a  feature of the Cisco USC B-Series servers).

Cisco Nexus 5020 Switches increased the speed of the backbone of the data center by 10 times (up to 10 Gbps). The Nexus switches are redundant in a virtual private cloud configured to eliminate the need for a spanning tree structure (to simplify the environment and help ensure better performance).

The Cisco MDS 9148 Multilayer Fabric Switch was used to create redundant paths to the storage environment.

About SENAI Santa Catarina

A corporation member of the Federation of Industries of the State of Santa Catarina, SENAI Santa Catarina supports the education industry with technical-level training and higher education. It also offers training courses for apprentices and on-demand training for companies and institutions, besides providing high school classes linked to vocational education. In 2010, SENAI Santa Catarina had more than 90,000 students registered.

SENAI also contributes to the competitiveness of industry through consulting and laboratory services (quality and compliance assurance, assessment of raw materials, proficiency tests and certifications). In all, almost 173,000 laboratory tests were conducted in 2010, and 108,000 hours of environmental, technological and management consultations were provided, along with contributions to 532 industries capturing innovation resources. For more information, visit: www.sc.senai.br.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. For information about Cisco, please visit http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, visit http://newsroom.cisco.com.

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