Grupo Industrial Saltillo chooses Cisco UCS for its Data Center

MEXICO CITY, July 9, 2015 – Grupo Industrial Saltillo, GIS, a Mexican industrial company based in the north of Mexico, has deployed Cisco UCS® in their new data center. As a result, it has reduced operational costs and obtained better performance of its network.

Cisco® UCS, now used by over 41,000 customers worldwide, is the first data center platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture blade and rack-mount servers with networking and storage access into a single converged system. The system is a set of pre-integrated data center components that creates a virtual server comprised of blade and rack servers, network adapters, fabric extenders, and interconnects, all of which are integrated under a common embedded management system.

GIS is a company with more than 6,400 employees working on five business units that manufactures and commercializes products for the automotive, construction, and houseware sectors. The company has production plans in five Mexican cities and commercial offices nationwide and in the United States.

Formerly to cover all its requirements for its international network, GIS rented space with a data center supplier. Close to the end of that contract and after an analysis about developing its own data center, according to the particular needs of their 1,500 IT users, GIS looked for an option that could help them to reduce at least 30% the IT operation.

GIS decided to develop their own data center and chose Cisco UCS. After the deployment, GIS has obtained significant improvements on its network performance. Cisco UCS helped them to migrate from 18 to 7 racks, therefore obtaining cost reductions including energy used, cooling space, equipment maintenance, and management. The backup times using LAN become 8 times faster, access to storage improved 30%, and load of servers came from 70% to 10%. In general terms the company has an operation 40% lower than previously.

"After learning about Cisco UCS we decided to develop our own data center, only renting the physical space and energy, using this technology and having the control and capacity that previously through the outsourcing was out of our reach," said Francisco Ramos, Project Infrastructure Manager from GIS. "The migration using virtual servers helped us to do a seamless transition; reducing space thus racks equipment and having countable benefits in its operation".

"Cisco UCS offers to our customers manageability, agility, operational efficiency, and flexibility," said Rogelio Velasco, Vice-President of Cisco Mexico. "Customers are adopting UCS because our innovation drives positive business outcomes for them."

The deployment of Cisco UCS was done with the support of Ikusi de Mexico, a Cisco Gold Partner and includes:

• Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server: To address the broadest set of workloads, from IT and web infrastructure to distributed database.

• Cisco UCS C220 M3 rack server : Designed for performance and density over a wide range of business workloads, from web serving to distributed database.

• Cisco Nexus® 5000 Series Switches: Designed to deliver high-density top-of-rack (ToR) Layer 2 and Layer 3, 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet with unified ports in compact one-, two-, and four-rack-unit form factors.

• Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders are designed to provide connectivity for rack, as well as converged fabric deployments.

Facts about UCS

• The consistent growth of UCS sales validates the trust customers are placing in Cisco.
• In just six years, UCS has reached more than 41,000 customers.
• 85% of the Fortune 500 has chosen UCS because of its innovative architecture,
• Last quarter (Q3 FY15) saw a 7% growth QoQ

- In 2014, after just five years in the market, we reached the top position in the x86 blade server market in the Americas, demonstrating how Cisco's differentiated approach continues to resonate with customers

About Grupo Industrial Saltillo

Grupo Industrial Saltillo, a 100% Mexican company traded on the Mexican Stock Exchange, manufactures and markets products through different sectors. In the Autoparts Sector it is a manufacturing leader of gray and ductile iron for brake, motor, transmission and suspension systems, as well as parts and components for domestic appliance, agricultural and railroad sectors. It also has operations in construction (water heaters, pipe fittings in plastic, iron and copper, and flooring in ceramic and porcelain) and housewares (diverse products for tableware and kitchenware).