An Increasing amount of organizations continue to shift their view of IT infrastructure as being a cost center to an enabler of business growth. Hence, businesses are looking for infrastructure that can deliver agility and availability while enabling diverse applications to coexist in the same infrastructure.

The Krones group, headquartered in Neutraubling, Germany, helps makes happy hour happen. Krones plans, develops, and manufactures machinery and complete plants for the fields of process, bottling, and packaging technology. The company processes millions of bottles and cans daily on behalf of breweries, the soft-drink sector, and manufacturers of wine, sparkling wine, and spirits.

If Krones needs a taste tester for one of their facilities I just may know someone with a little experience.

The company's data centers and IT solutions are an important part of their business. Their legacy IT infrastructure consisted of 200 physical servers and 700 virtual machines spread across three locations with business critical applications running Solaris operating system on a RISC-based architecture.

Krones wanted a server solution for both their UNIX and Microsoft Windows systems. The key requirements were to:

• Increase flexibility and efficiency using virtualization
• Improve performance
• Optmize the infrastructure for zero downtime
• Deliver a seamless migration for mission-critical applications
• Reduce complexity and speed up provisioning

They selected a Cisco Smart+Connected? Manufacturing solution, based on the Cisco? Unified Data Center architecture. At the heart of the solution was the Cisco Unified Computing System?, which runs standard server software along with Oracle databases, SAP systems, and Microsoft applications.

Krones dramatically improved agility and efficiency by migrating from RISC/Solaris to Cisco UCS/Linux. The time to install a blade server with Cisco UCS has decreased by a factor of ten and by increasing utilization through virtualization they are forecast to reduce their server footprint by one tenth the current number. Krones also expects to reduce costs through a 90 percent reduction in cabling and LAN/SAN ports. This reduction in complexity has also enabled security and software upgrades without incurring any downtime. Last but not least, the extra density and performance provided by the Cisco UCS blade servers is going to accelerate a planned SAP ERP migration delivering nearly twice the estimated scalability --please read the full case study here.