Enabling an innovative IT environment

Chapter 2

Stockport NHS Foundation Trust Accelerates Application Performance by 20x with Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco ACI

Stockport NHS Foundation Trust provides hospital care and health services for children and adults in Stockport and the surrounding areas of England. The trust sees half a million patients each year at its Stepping Hill Hospital and also operates the Devonshire Centre for Neuro-rehabilitation, the Swanbourne Gardens Respite Centre, and 24 regional health clinics.

Two Cisco HyperFlex™ clusters are stretched across the trust’s two data centers. Those clusters are tightly integrated with a backup, archiving, and file storage solution powered by Cisco UCS® servers and Cohesity software, providing synchronous replication, continuous backups, and seamless failover. What’s more, the clusters are optimized for specific workloads. One is dedicated to and tightly aligned with Stockport NHS’s VMware environment. The other is a high-density cluster that has been fine-tuned for Microsoft SQL Server databases.

“Our SQL workloads aren’t just mission critical, they’re life critical. With all-flash storage,
Cisco HyperFlex has given us a 20x performance improvement without increasing our
SQL licensing costs.”
– Peter Hughes Head of IT, Stockport NHS

Consumer Finance Leader Establishes Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure to Transform and Fuel Its Business

Money Mart Financial Services, formerly Dollar Financial Group, is a financial services company with more than 600 locations in the U.S. and Canada. The company offers installment loan, cash advance / payday loan, check cashing, prepaid card, money transfer, and other financial services.

No longer interested in managing data centers, Money Mart deployed eight Cisco HyperFlex clusters across two colocation facilities. The clusters are connected with Cisco ACI, the industry’s leading Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution, which provides policy consistency and hypervisor integration across private and public cloud environments.

“Hands-free IT is our goal. The combination of Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco ACI provides simplicity, stability, scalability, and security. It supports both legacy applications and modern, container-based workloads. And it’s tightly integrated with the public cloud.”
– Sankha Ghosh, CIO, Money Mart

Unifying City Operations and Accelerating Applications with Cisco HyperFlex

Pearland is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. From 2000 to 2018, the population of the Houston, Texas, suburb swelled from 37,000 citizens to more than 122,000. The community has one of the highest per capita incomes in the state and provides a wide range of attractive and affordable housing in some of America’s best planned neighborhoods.

After deploying a unified network platform, Pearland chose Cisco HyperFlex as the foundation of its data center and engine for its municipal services.

“Making the transition from traditional infrastructure to Cisco HyperFlex has been a great journey for us. We now have a simplified management platform, on-demand scalability, and better visibility of our data center environment. Most importantly, we have the flexibility we need to support all of the city’s operations, 24x7.”
– Daniel McGhinnis, CIO, City of Pearland

Learn more about City of Pearland and other companies using hyperconverged infrastructure in innovative ways on the Compute Customer Stories webpage.