Comstor drinks from its own well with UCS rollout

At your servers: Comstor replaced its HP hardware with Cisco UCS technology

Cisco-focused distributor Comstor has rolled out the networking vendor's unified computing system (UCS) datacentre kit, and claims "eating our own dog food" is the ultimate recommendation for the technology.

Last year the distributor took advice on revamping its storage capabilities at its datacentres in the UK and the US. Having ascertained that such a project would cost about $5m, Comstor decided to consolidate the two datacentres into one location in Cincinnati.

At the same time, the distributor was undertaking a virtualisation project. Having previously used HP kit for its datacentre requirements, the firm decided to implement a UCS platform at the Ohio facility. The Cisco offering combined computing, networking, storage and virtualisation technologies.

Comstor's chief technology officer William Hurley claimed replacing the distributor's three HP servers would have cost $1m and provided "one-third of the computing power" of Cisco UCS.

"For one-third of the price, we were able to install an entire new platform, " he added.

The key selling point of the Cisco technology was its virtualisation capabilities, said Hurley. Comstor plans to migrate its worldwide enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the UCS platform in due course. The Westcon-owned distributor will then set about an ERP upgrade.

UCS technology provides the scope to add new applications as the ERP touch-up takes place, said Comstor. Hurley also hailed the UCS Manager product, claiming it simplifies the integration of software developed by third parties or in-house.

“We did not know when we started how exciting Cisco UCS Manager was going to be, and how it would really help us get our applications into production much more quickly and efficiently,” he explained.

“Previously, it would have taken as much as two weeks for us to acquire, install, configure and get the servers up and running. Now, it can take less than four hours.

"That is critical for test environments, because you can have as many as four images – test, pre-production, production, and performance. If you did not plan properly, each image could take even longer than two weeks.”

UCS was launched in March last year and Comstor told ChannelWeb that it had been the fourth customer worldwide to move to a UCS platform. David McNicholas, director of strategic business development at Comstor, claimed having the technology in-house helps demonstrates its power to potential customers.

“The only way IT organisations can get projects approved by executive management is if they can demonstrate the cost savings and return on investment, " he said. "Cisco UCS is really designed to address that issue on a scale not seen before.”