Our Cisco partners and UCS solutions make a great team, helping customers achieve significant results in establishing efficient and cost-effective data center environments. The latest Partner Voices blog highlights how Cisco partner Trend Micro helped a nonprofit organization bolster its data center security as it migrated to a virtual environment.

The United Way of Greater Atlanta (UWGA), an important arm of one of the leading nonprofit organizations in the United States, strives to create positive change and address local challenges affecting education, health, homelessness and income. With limited resources, the organization pays particular attention to cost and efficiency factors.

In this particular case, a team of 10 people was responsible for all the IT aspects of the organization. This proved quite challenging when the team was spending the majority of its time on server maintenance, without the ability to look for larger optimization or efficiency opportunities. In addition, the majority of the organization's fundraising efforts were concentrated near the end of the year, making the demand on the databases and servers particularly taxing during those months.

In an effort to simplify the process and increase data center efficiency, the team began the search for an integrated data center platform that would provide enterprise-class performance and scalability while simultaneously providing easy manageability, a compact footprint and greater energy efficiency.

UGWA's search led them to Cisco UCS solutions with the goal of deploying new virtual servers.  By migrating to a virtual environment, UGWA realized that its existing security solution placed the organization at risk for antivirus storms, which would compromise the entire project. To prevent this, UGWA selected Deep Security from Solution Partner Trend Micro for its scalability and capability of protecting the virtual environment without impacting performance.

This new data center environment -which includes Cisco UCS servers and the Deep Security solution from Trend Micro, a Cisco Solution Partner Program member -made deployment easier and far more cost effective than ever before. Since implementing this architecture the UGWA has seen the following results:

• Accelerated deployment time for new servers. Down from several days to less than an hour
• Reduced deployment costs by 70 percent
• Improved scalability

For UGWA these results translated into significant savings, allowing funds to be allocated elsewhere to greater positive impact the overall community. UGWA has future plans to expand its efforts, eventually replacing all computers with virtualized desktops in an effort to further reduce costs by centralizing all security and business applications in the data center.

We are proud that Cisco products and partners can yield impactful results for customers. Make sure to the read the full case study here and let us know what you think about this latest solution from Trend Micro.