Levi Strauss & Co. accelerates its business and technology objectives by teaming up with SAP, Cisco, EMC, VMware and an integration team from Accenture to explore the potential benefits of running SAP software in a private cloud environment. 

The famous jeans maker uses the Vblock Infrastructure Packages, an integrated IT offering that includes virtualization, compute, storage security and management technologies. These include the Unified Computing System and Multilayer Director Switches (MDS) from Cisco, EMC Symmetrix V-Max and EMC CLARiiON CX4 Storage Systems (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform. 

"From both a business and IT perspective, the results are significant and highly compelling, clearly showing how a private cloud environment could help us better manage our SAP landscape and contain costs at the same time," said Tom Peck, SVP and CIO, Levi Strauss & Co. "We also saw how we could achieve greater agility in our business applications to rapidly meet our internal customer business needs. And all of this was achievable through better utilization of our infrastructure assets, without sacrificing performance, security or availability -- a really big plus."

Running SAP software on the Vblock architecture can help: 

· Reduce capital expenses for hardware and software due to use of scalable servers and proprietary virtualization management tools 

· Minimize implementation costs due to reduced planning and design requirements, simple setup and reconfiguration of virtual machines and the use of pre-configured templates 

· Save project costs due to increased business agility achieved through reduced system management efforts and the ability to add or remove virtual machines based on demand 

· Reduce upgrade expenditures due to quick and easy provisioning of test- and training systems on demand and fallback scenarios right out of the box.