Leading Botswana cellular network Vista Cellular, is extending its partnership with global e-commerce player Sun Microsystems to keep up with growing cellular and customer demand in the country.
"IT infrastructure is a critical element of our service. Sun has always been there to encourage and support our strategic objectives in this regard," says Tebo Seema, IT Director at Vista Cellular.
Sun's Channel Development Partner in Botswana, cdpAFRICA, installed Enterprise 5500 and 420R Servers and StorEdge A5200 disk arrays. The Enterprise servers feature high performance processors, dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing which is ideal for databases, service providers and financial institutions, whilst the A5200 is Sun's highest performing storage subsystem.
"Vista Cellular is committed to customer satisfaction and therefore wanted to enhance their current services by reducing billing cycles and holding online records for rapid retrieval purposes. This led to the enhancement of their billing system and storage capabilities," says Anthony Duckworth, director of cdpAFRICA.
Vista Cellular, a subsidiary of France Telecom, focuses on the niche corporate market in Botswana. "We have a well organised growing infrastructure in Botswana that needs to be captured and Vista is doing just that," says Seema.
As part of its customer commitment, Vista is storing a year's online information on Sun's A5200 disk arrays to provide its staff with the necessary tools to accommodate customer queries. "The installation of the A5200 is the first of five channel switches to be deployed which will eventually move Vista to a SAN (storage area network) environment," he comments.
"SANs are a highly economical and scaleable way for companies to keep pace with today's ever-increasing storage demands."
Sun's long-time partner Oracle has also installed the database for the financial division of Vista. "To deploy Oracle was the natural choice given the excellent relationship between Sun and Oracle," comments Seema.
Sun's reach in Botswana is extensive and covers a number of vertical markets. "Together with Sun we're involved with projects that cover the telecommunications and the financial services sector, education and as cdpAFRICA we provide Internet related infrastructure and solutions within the Botswana market place," says Duckworth.
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Sun Enterprise 5500 server combines up to 14 high performance processors and 2.5TB of storage rack mounted in a single data centre cabinet. It features dynamic reconfiguration, alternate pathing which is ideal for compute and I/O intensive databases and business applications.
Sun Enterprise 420R
Sun Enterprise 420R server is a four processor workgroup server for network computing that features a highly modular rack optimised 4RU design. Based on the UltraSPARC processor technology, it's the ideal server for service providers and financial institutions.
The Sun StorEdge A5200 Fibre Channel disk array is Sun's highest performance Fibre Channel array to date, offering high-availability and high-bandwidth storage subsystems for the data centre.
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