Mexico City, March 6, 2014.- Grupo Pochteca has chosen Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS) servers , NetApp storage (FAS3220 HA systems) within the FlexPod architecture, and Cisco® Networking and Security Appliance for its new data center in order to develop their private cloud infrastructure under a flexible, scalable and highly secure environment to meet current and future business requirements. With this joint solution, the company has simplified data management and has dramatically reduced the time to deliver new applications and services.

Grupo Pochteca is one of the largest distributors of industrial raw materials in Mexico and part of Latin America. They serve more than 8,000 customers each month across more than 500 cities in Mexico. Pochteca is also present in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Brasil.

A public company listed in the Mexican Stock Exchange Market, Pochteca has seen impressive growth in recent years fueled both by organic growth and through acquisitions, and expects to keep growing at the same rate in the near future.

Grupo Pochteca’s new data center is fully developed with NetApp and Cisco technology. Located in Queretaro, Qro. the data center provides services for the 34 Offices in Mexico and four Offices in Latin America for transactional applications like SAP/R3 (ECC, BW, CRM) 500 concurrent users, and business applications like email, e-billing and Intranet.

Pochteca is achieving time and cost savings through snapshot technology for backups, quick server (physical and virtual) provisioning through UCS service profiles and NetApp’s FAS3220 Storage Platforms, and virtualization. Also reduction in testing and development cycles with SAP through cloning capabilities. All these also help to recover from errors in SAP kernel upgrades and test DR.

FlexPod is a converged computing, networking and storage solution developed by Cisco and NetApp. FlexPod components include Cisco UCS servers, NetApp unified storage systems, and Cisco Nexus® networking fabric. The FlexPod architecture can scale up or out, and can be optimized for a variety of mixed workloads in both virtualized and nonvirtualized environments.

Key Quotes:

• Armando Santa Cruz, General Director of Grupo Pochteca:

“As industry leaders, we need to evolve our IT platform and strategy in order to respond to our current and future needs and guarantee the support for company organic growth within all areas of the business, national and internationally.We chose Cisco due to their data center vision as well as the reliability in the technology that has demonstrated significant advantages in their market.”

• Juan Portilla, General Manager of NetApp Mexico

Our data storage platforms are our most powerful ever, with up to 80% more performance, 100% more capacity, nondisruptive operations, and industry-leading storage efficiency. For Pochteca, that meant they didn’t have to compromise performance or value. We are delighted to have worked together with Genesi in the process of helping Pochteca deploy their data center’s go-live in record time.”

• Rogelio Velasco, Vice President of Cisco México

“Cisco UCS and networking fabric offers our customers the possibility to lower infrastructure costs, reduce the deployment time, improve application performance at the time that reduces power and cooling costs. We are very pleased to support Grupo Pochteca in their daily operations through a flexible solution.”

Pochteca partnered with NetApp,  Genesi Networks and Cisco  to make the strategic decisions that led to the final architecture. Genesi was a major integrator, taking charge of the construction of the data center building, designing the power systems, networking, Cisco and NetApp architectures, and orchestrating the SAP migration project..

Cisco UCS Facts

Since it was first introduced five years ago, UCS has become highly successful with companies because it delivers superior customer benefits.

UCS achievements since 2009:

• 30,000 UCS customers worldwide.
• No. 2 world market share by revenue in x86 blade servers.
• Over 3,850 UCS channel partners.
• Ten of thousands of supported applications.
• 82 world record performance benchmarks to date.
• More than 75% of all Fortune 500 customers have invested in UCS.

About Grupo Pochteca

Pochteca is a company with 25 years in the market that distributes industrial materials, the best offer in one channel. Pochteca has 36 distribution centers: 32 are in Mexico and three in Central America and Brasil. Pochteca distributes products to over 100 world class suppliers and it is present in more than 500 cities in Mexico. Thorough this network serves 8,000 customers per month and commercializes more than 4,000 products. Since 1996 is listed in the Mexican Stock Market.

About NetApp

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com.