This client needed to drastically expand its datacenter infrastructure and implement multiple changes for a new service offering while maintaining a 99.999% uptime requirement.
The Challenge:
In order to compete with other telecommunication providers, this Fortune 500 telecom company was rolling out a new line of business that infused free add-on services to their mobile cell phone service offerings. A number of applications were developed as value-add items, including a cloud application that backed up user photos and videos from their personal mobile phones.
The client required 24/7/365 maintenance of its datacenter infrastructure and operational response with strict SLA’s. Although massive in size with thousands of vendors that provide individual IT services, the telecom client required a talented team that could provide intelligence and support across traditional categories including datacenter operations, networking and security. In order to achieve this goal, they were faced with the prospect of finding multiple vendors and the difficult proposition of managing all those partnerships.
With VIMRO, the client was able to get all services they required under one umbrella, and at a significant cost savings that comes standard with bundling multiple services. They also had the added value of a single, streamlined business relationship, straightforward reporting, a single invoice and little chance of communication breakdown.
What We Did:
- Installation – The VIMRO team built out the staging and production datacenter environments, including cabinet set up, cable management and structured cabling, and installed and configured servers, routers, switches, storage devices and load balancers.
- Network Routing – VIMRO built the network with a focus on 100% uptime due to a high 99.999% client demand. The client required the implementation of a fully redundant network within all layers, including multiple paths and automated failover for internet connectivity.
- Storage System Design & Management – Cost effectiveness and performance requirements led to a large, scalable NFS storage environment implementation utilizing top storage vendors. Ingest demands of the customer peaked at over 4 TB per day. Initial requirements were set to handle ingest volume, but secondary backup, as well as real-time offsite disaster recovery backup were implemented later to bolster the environment and protect against customer data loss.
- Infrastructure Security – Running dual networks consisting of data and storage required a physical and logical separation of components to ensure user data was isolated. Firewalls, vlans, IP-addressing schemes and access-lists were used to ensure the network environments were isolated. VIMRO also implemented industry best practices, such as RFC 1918 filtering and network encryption where appropriate since the system was internet connected.
- Virtualization Environment Design and Operations – A Virtualization environment was used to provide ongoing scalability. This virtualization environment was strategically partitioned to take full advantage of the underlying resources. As user capacity increased over time, the client could simply add raw resources into the proper partition to easily scale.
- Shared Services & Monitoring Application Support – Services included NTP, DNS, Repository and SNMP to provide ancillary software support to the overall environment.
Results:
VIMRO professionals – including project managers, smart hands team, network, security, systems and storage admins – worked in partnership with the client’s architecture teams to deploy both production and test infrastructure environments to support the product life cycle. Special consideration was needed to develop the storage network capabilities as IP technologies were implemented to support the storage of customer data.
VIMRO staff delivered critical operational and technical skills with minimal notice, and the datacenter operations were able to meet the 99.999% uptime requirement. The platform scaled significantly and the rigorous uptime objectives were met. Due to the original high scalability design and effective deployment, a later infrastructure and component overhaul was not required even when the application user base grew to over 2 million users.
Ultimately, VIMRO provided just the right services the client needed and offered the convenience of dealing with a single partner for various expert services. This streamlined approach saved the client time, money and hassle, and allowed the project to succeed.
