EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SKANSKAA worldwide construction company with 53,000 employees globally

ChallengeReduce data centre operating

costs.

Make IT cost more predictable.

Help ensure business continuity in the event of a catastrophic IT

system failure

Improve customer service by boosting speed, performance,

and resilience.

ResultsFaster and simpler disaster

recovery

Predictable costs as business grows

Increased performance and High Availability improves customer

experience

Reduced Energy consumption

Reduced operational costs through simplified management

Decreased capex, increased revenue

SolutionEngaged Creative ITC for

planning and deployment.

Cisco Nexus 7000 and 5000 Series Switches provide high

throughput 10GigE connectivity.

Cisco Nexus Fabric Extenders create scalable access layer for

unified server environment.

Cisco and NetApp advanced technologies provide full

Colocation Disaster recovery solution.

320 City Road, London, EC1V 2NZ

creative-itc.comenquiries@creative-itc.com0207 6822820

Global Construction firm maximises Cisco Data Centertechnology to its full potential.

SKANSKA BUILT ITS NEW DATA CENTERWITH CISCO NEXUS, REDUCING POWER

CONSUMPTION AND INCREASING EFFICIENCY

CHALLENGESkanska is a leading international project development and construction company, a Fortune 500 company and a member of the UN Global Compact.

Skanska has a history dating back to 1887 and with over 53,000 employees globally across selected home markets in Europe, the US and Latin America, making Skanska one of the world’s ten largest construction companies. Skanska UK Plc. combines design, civil engineering and building services with a wide range of specialist skills. It integrates all disciplines to provide a “Skanska Solution” and works together with clients, partners and the supply chain to offer a different approach to the way construction is delivered in the UK. Skanska were looking for an established Cisco partner with proven Nexus design, implementation and support skills, with the agility to meet the ever changing nature of their business requirements.

Skanska also needed to engage a Cisco partner with advanced NetApp skills, as an element of this project was to enable a NetApp data redundancy solution running across the new Cisco core. As a Cisco Premier and NetApp Platinum partner Creative were able to give Skanska the peace of mind that Creative would be able to design, implement and support all aspects of this solution from server connectivity all the way through to configuration of the storage array.

“After the successful completion of the DC core upgrade project, ITC’s relationship with Skanska has continued to go from strength to strength“

Steve McArdleHead of Networks

Russ Fry, Head of IT Infrastructure and Security was challenged by his IT Director to deploy a high performing, scalable and resilient infrastructure that would allow Skanska to develop the Business in the coming years:

“The decision to engage with Creative ITC as our sole incumbent supplier was based on a number of factors including:

Creative’s ability to provide a concise and accurate assessment of our existing legacy estate … they helped stabilise some areas before even looking at the new solution.

Creative’s ability to provide high availability both in terms of System Engineers and Technical Design Consultants to produce both High Level/ detailed Low Level Design.

Creative’s extensive experience in deploying and managing enterprise level Data Centre solutions including key technologies such as Nexus, UCS and NetApp SAN storage, as well as the ability to deploy both technical design authority and user acceptance testing and maintenance support.

Creative’s outstanding relationship with Cisco and unrivalled attention to detail and excellent response times”.

After engaging with Cisco via Creative and the collaboration between Creative Design Architects and Skanska’s internal design team, Skanska determined the strategic road map for its future Datacentre network infrastructure would be based on the Cisco Nexus family.

The Nexus range was selected due to the high availability, increased bandwidth, scalability and resiliency afforded by the platform, as well as the opportunities for Skanska to improve their IT offerings provided by its many advanced features.

Working closely with Skanska’s IT Solutions team, Creative’s extensive experience on the Cisco Nexus platform enabled them to provide and execute a project plan that ensured a smooth migration from the old infrastructure onto the new Nexus based core and server access, bringing the benefits of Nexus technology to Skanska with minimal disruption to their business.

Once the new DC network was in place, deep knowledge of NetApp and Cisco integration enabled Creative to provide a state of the art data redundancy system incorporating advanced features from both Nexus and NetApp solution sets. Skanska are now able to replicate 20 TB of data every 15 minutes from their live datacentre to a disaster recovery colocation facility 20 miles away using a solution that leverages Cisco OTV and NetApp SnapMirror technologies.

SOLUTION

“The Cisco Nexus 7000 was the clear best choice in our environment because of the

combination of OTV, scalability, and flexibility to support multiple protocols in

one switch”

Russ Fry,Head of IT Infrastructure & Security

RESULTSFaster and simplified disaster recovery: “OTV enables us to move our server VLAN from Maple Cross to our Secondary Data Centre with a couple of commands, without client-side changes”, says Will Burchell Head of Platform and Storage. Coupling this with the data mirroring solution, the loss of an entire Datacentre would cause minimal impact to Skanska’s day to day IT operations.

Predictable costs as business grows: The huge scalability of the Nexus platform, especially regarding 10gig port density means that once the Nexus core is in place, 10 gig port count can scale as the business grows without incurring further significant capital expenditure.

Decreased Capex, increased Revenue: By leveraging Cisco’s VDC (Virtual Device Context) technology, the solution was able to offer Skanska a consolidated DC core consisting of two switches where previously six were required. This also freed up rack space which Skanska can now use to provide hosted services to their customers.

Lower cabling costs: A distributed server access topology using Nexus Fabric Extenders has enabled savings of approximately $80 per server access port. Also, Nexus technology has opened up the possibility to Skanska of further consolidating cabling by using Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

More efficient bandwidth use: The vPC (virtual PortChannel) feature of Cisco Nexus switches eliminated the need for Spanning Tree Protocol, effectively doubling the available bandwidth in the core.

High Availability via Non- disruptive upgrades: The ISSU (In Service Software Upgrade) feature on the Nexus platform enables Skanska to upgrade software on the core switches without scheduling downtime.

Increased performance: The high throughput and 10gig port density on the Nexus switches ensure that even with increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications, Skanska are able to provide a fast, reliable, and scalable service to their customers. Architecture at Skanska “all wanting to use the latest and fastest servers and computer processing. If you can’t deliver lots of 10Gbps Ethernet ports, and deliver them quickly and cost effectively, then you’ve got a problem.”

Simplified management: The IT department can now manage connectivity to 576 servers from a single switch interface. “Using a single point of management for up to 576 devices saves time”, Steve McArdle says. “In addition, the Cisco Nexus 7000, 5000, and 2000 devices use the same operating system, NX-OS, which reduces the number operating systems that our IT staff need to learn.”

Reduced energy consumption: Before the data center upgrade, Skanska was using more than 80% of available energy, the maximum recommended. “We have reduced our energy consumption while also increasing reliability and data throughput compared to our previous solution”, says Peter Dorrington - Data Centre Manager.

To learn more about Creative ITC and the solutions featured in this case study, visit www.creative-itc.com

After the successful completion of the DC core upgrade project, Creative ITC’s relationship with Skanska has continued to go from strength to strength, Skanska have recently implemented a Cisco FlexPod solution based on Cisco UCS B series servers and NetApp storage, again making use of Creative expertise in this area and the unique collaborative engagement they offer.

SINCE THEN...