Mauritius Telecom, the primary telecommunications provider on the Indian Ocean island, has selected Sun Fire servers supplied by Sun Microsystems sub-Saharan Africa to power its operational support systems.
The company runs a fully digital network, which has seen considerable expansion in recent years through the introduction of new technologies and services to meet the growing needs of residential, business and corporate customers. It has a strategic alliance with France Telecom, and operations in several countries including Madagascar, Mozambique and Burundi.
According to Claude Ibalanky, partner account manager at Sun Microsystems sub-Saharan Africa, the company recently upgraded its infrastructure to cope with increased demand for its services. "We supplied two Sun Fire Enterprise 10000 servers to Mauritius Telecom, edging out a number of other bidders to win this deal," he says.
Because the company is an existing user of Sun Fire systems - fielding a number of V880 mid-range machines - the decision to remain with the proven SPARC/Solaris platform made sense from a skills and familiarity point of view, says Viren Bissoonauth, head of IT for Mauritius Telecom.
"We now have the two E10000 servers as our main servers, with massive Sun T3 and L700 disk storage and a number of V880 servers," he explains.
"In expanding our Sun platform, we have retained the architecture that we wanted, with full redundancy, and abundant processing power. Future expansion capability is also retained, while we are satisfied from our previous experience that the reliability and after-sales support on the products is outstanding," says Bissoonauth.
The Sun Enterprise 10000 server is designed for large-scale, mission-critical applications, such as high-volume OLTP (online transaction processing), server consolidation, data warehousing, and decision support. The machine delivers mainframe-like Dynamic System Domains, enabling it to host multiple workloads, automatically adapting to the needs of the business as the application environment changes.
Ibalanky adds that Sun is an accepted leader in providing solutions to the telecommunications industry. "France Telecom, which has a significant stake in the Mauritian operation, is also a major Sun user, so it wanted a platform that it was sure it could rely upon," he says.
Despite the predisposition to use Sun equipment, the telco nevertheless requested proposals from several major Unix server vendors. The Sun solution was accepted because of its high availability and ability to provision server resources on the fly.
"The E10K servers are in a clustered environment; with the RISC architecture combined with reliability, availability and security characteristics of the Unix environment, has provided unprecedented computing power in the Mauritius Telecom network," says Roshan Teeluck, systems engineer at State Informatics Limited, which was responsible for the system implementation. "Also, the uptime of the system implemented has been above 99%," he adds.
With support for up to 64 CPUs, 64GB of shared memory, and more than 100TB of storage, the Enterprise 10000 servers power many of the world's most demanding, mission-critical application environments, says Ibalanky.
"Telecommunications companies around the world consistently choose the Sun platform to control the most important aspects of their networks - the billing and invoicing systems. These highly complex environments, dealing with hundreds of thousands of individual clients, demand the reliability and security that Sun systems deliver," he concludes.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision - "The Network Is The Computer" - has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.
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