Recent trends like BYOD, Virtualization, Cloud and Video is driving unprecedented levels of data growth and demanding strong interdependency between the virtual server, network, and storage environments.Customers agree that in order to properly support consolidated, highly virtualized environments, organizations need improved, easy-to-manage server, network and storage, capable of cloud scale and performance.
The complexity and expense of maintaining dual storage and network interfaces, cabling, and switch ports becomes significant as the data centers grow.  Data center convergence helps to cut cost and increase efficiency by consolidating multi-protocol storage and LAN traffic onto a single, scalable, and intelligent network.
In recent ESG research conducted with North American networking professionals, 41% of survey respondents had already consolidated to a common Ethernet network, another 34% planned to do so in the next 24 months, and another 18% were interested in doing so.  ESG also published a Field Audit Report, which shows a clear uptake on convergence adoption by large and small customers from different vertical segments.

Highlights of the ESG finding ( full paper )

•  A regional medical center implemented a converged Cisco network, compute, and management infrastructure, resulting in a much simpler and less expensive environment that is managed by only two IT staff members.
• A U.S. subsidiary of global financial organization has achieved five-nines availability, lower costs, no business outages, and provisioning times of 20 minutes (instead of days) since implementing its Cisco unified networking and UCS infrastructure.
• A large manufacturing organization uses Cisco converged networking for its high-performance computing environment, saving in energy, labor, and equipment costs, with higher availability and better performance, enabling a future full-cloud environment with consolidated management, reporting, and chargeback.

 Please take a look at the multi-part blog by Amit Jain.  In his blog (part 1) he explains how Boeing uses FCOE to consolidate IP and SAN traffic, as dual core technologies were adding complexities. 

  ".......we are utilizing the cores better, and increasing I/O with fewer cables and fewer switches,"says Dennis Kuehn Technical Fellow. "This consolidation means we use less floor space and power, as well as cut cooling costs."    Full case study.

The second blog (part 2) featuring University of Siegen, Germany, where the converged infrastructure enabled the University to virtualize its real server estate while improving the speed of provisioning and scalability.

"This consolidation has not only saved data center space, but has also brought corresponding reductions in power and cooling costs,"says Matthias Trute of the server team."We have increased the reliability and the redundancy of our infrastructure and decreased power usage by about 30 percent.........."     Full case study.

 There are lot more customers gaining efficiency and reducing cost by deploying  cisco unified data center infrastructure.  Here is a list of few customer case studies, as you can see, customers in different verticals benefited using cisco datacenter solutions.

Engineering:   Geometric Achieves Efficiency with VDI 

Entertainment/Media:   Human Kinetics Optimizes Data Center, Improves Performance

Financial:  AmWINS Group Improves Scalability and Enhances Services

Government:      King County Creates Shared Infrastructure on FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud and Saves$700,000 Annually

 Healthcare: Health Insurance Company Improves Service and Cuts Cost 

 Legal:  Legal Services Provider Improves Agility, Reduces Expenses (Case Study)

 Professional Services:    Case Study: Group Agrica Rises to Data Center Challenge

Service Provider:   HireRight Scales to Meet Real-Time Demand

Technology:Xerox: Process and Document Leader Improves Cloud Services Delivery 

To learn more about LAN/SAN convergence, please listen to the recording of the recent Webinar, in which few of the Multi-hop FCoE case studies were highlighted. ( https://p.brighttalk.com/cisco/cudc/north_america/?commid=83559  ) And Stay tuned for more !

 For more info:  www.cisco.com/go/mds
Tony Antony
Cisco DC Products and solutions Marketing
Sr Marketing Manager DC Solutions