When Snam, an Italian gas company, needed to update its data centers why did it choose Cisco quipment-specifically Nexus switches-to do the job? Because the Nexus switches were the only platform to offer Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), which allowed virtual machines to be transferred without interrupting services.

For Snam, non-interruption of services was an important part of the plan because the company manages a 55,0000 kilometer local distribution network, a 32,000 kilometer transport network with eight storage sites and one regasification plant. Add these factors with the company's eight data centers hosting 220 applications and this was going to be a tricky job-especially since any service interruption would be costly and potentially disastrous.

The scope of the job was three-fold: Snam wanted its eight data centers consolidated to one data center. Secondly, the company wanted a streamlined virtualized architecture and finally, create a system that ensured disaster recovery.

With this much data being moved, selecting the Cisco switches with OTV was the correct choice. It safely transferred all applications and data from the eight locations to the new data center without any business interruption.

The results have been astounding!

Snam reports server virtualization has improved by 40 percent. With a private cloud implemented, the speed of development testing has also accelerated. Company inefficiencies have dropped as there are now only two versions of operating systems instead of 25, three versions of middleware instead of 13 and two databases instead of 10.

Telecommunication and Integrated Systems Manager Giuseppe Falivelli said it best, "Everything is so much easier to run than before."

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