By now it's no secret that Cisco was recently recognized by IDC as number one in several Unified Computing System (UCS) categories. This immense achievement could never have been realized without help from the many dedicated Cisco partners who are using the UCS technology to solve real-world business problems for customers. Since we already feature partners in our Partner Voices series, it only stands to reason that a case combining solution partner StorMagic and Cisco UCS was fitting for this latest blog post.

Housing lenders need to feel secure in their decision to approve customer mortgage requests. In order to do this, many originators, servicers and government entities rely on risk management services provider Digital Risk LLC. From credit risk to operational risk and fraud, Digital Risk provides a comprehensive platform to service the entire mortgage lifecycle or points along the way, depending on the customer's need.

As a growing company, Digital Risk needed to keep an eye on its budget while providing high availability and robust performance of database servers. In order to do this, the company wanted to virtualize database, reporting, and data warehousing servers with VMware vSphere and needed servers that could handle the load of a virtualized SQL Server environment, as well as shared storage. In order to achieve this, Digital Risk turned to Cisco UCS and StorMagic.

For its VMware host servers, Digital Risk chose Cisco UCS -the same servers it uses to support other parts of its business. For cost-effective yet reliable shared storage, the company turned to StorMagic, a Cisco Solution Partner Program member. The StorMagic SvSAN solution that was chosen is unique in that it leverages the internal drives in the VMware host servers to create a virtual mirror between storage in different physical servers, enabling shared-storage architecture at a fraction of the cost of a traditional SAN.

As a direct result of implementing a combined Cisco UCS and StorMagic solution Digital Risk saw:

• Simplified deployment and acceleration:the proof of concept took only 6 weeks to complete, compared to the estimated 6 months it would have taken with a traditional SAN solution
• Substantial cost savings:saved$250,000 in equipment costs to support new business
• New revenue streams:Thanks to reduced risk and maximized productivity, Digital Risk has the capacity and performance capabilities to take on new customers and partners

These results convinced Digital Risk to move all new businesses to the Cisco UCS/StorMagic cluster.

I encourage you to read the full case study and share your thoughts with us in our comments section. We always love to share these success stories with you, but more importantly, I want to hear your thoughts on how we can continue working together to provide these types of business outcomes to customers.