Cisco Introduces Their Solutions at Storage Networking World

Cisco (News - Alert) has dreams of having all data centers go green therefore they have announced that they are expanding their Data Center 3.0 solution set. The application delivery network has disaster recovery, security and regulatory compliances that accelerate data center traffic replication over wide-area networks. “The Cisco Data Center 3.0 provides a framework for reliable, highly secure, responsive and green data centers,” claims the company.

 

Another solution Cisco also announced was their Cisco WAAS (Wide-Area Application Services) software. WAAS helps reduce bandwidth requirements, data replication, time to recovery, and data loss, while increasing acceptable distance between data centers and aiding regulatory compliance. A newer version, offers a Replication Accelerator that optimizes data center replication capabilities for storage applications.

 

WAAS may help information technology (IT) managers balance wide-area network bandwidth limitations when remotely duplicating data over Internet Protocol (IP) networks between data centers, improving disaster recovery and business continuance. It was tested and validated for use with EMC (News - Alert) SRDF and NetApp SnapMirror applications, and is supported on the Cisco Wide Area Application Engine WAE-7341 and WAE-7371 appliances.

 

Michael Baker, of Michael Baker Corp., based in Moon Township PA, selected Cisco Data Center solutions to centralize IT operations to reduce costs and enable the enterprise to use offices and employees more effectively. Michael Baker Corp. provides professional services for engineering, operations, and maintenance services worldwide.

 

"The new Cisco WAAS Replication Accelerator mode will allow us to transfer more data between data centers in a shorter period of time, maximizing the use of WAN connections and eliminating the transfer of redundant data across the link for greater business continuity," said Jeremy Gill, vice president of information technology for Michael Baker. "Cisco WAAS is complementary with the Cisco MDS portfolio, taking FCIP-based replication traffic from the MDS and optimizing the traffic to reduce backup time, typically from more than eight hours to less than one hour. The end-to-end Cisco 3.0 data center solution also provides greater manageability and ease of use for the IT staff.”

 

Baker estimates that since the upgrade to WAAS, the company has been able to reduce costs, estimating savings of over $1 million on one project.