For the past three months, UUNET SA - South Africa`s leading corporate Internet network provider - has hosted the dotcoza website, with a monthly average traffic rate of more than 38 000 Mbps, and carried dotcoza`s own e-commerce traffic without outages.
Says UUNET SA`s Justin Colyn: "The resilience and redundancy of our IP core network made it easy for us to allocate 3 Mbps of bandwidth to the dotcoza experiment. It also ensured that we would have no outages on Andersen Consulting`s video broadcast server, hosted at our New Doornfontein data centre, or on dotcoza`s 128 kb line to New Doornfontein."
The dotcoza project has served to demonstrate that network capacity for e-commerce in South Africa is world-class.
It has also shown that the data centres are the quickest, easiest and most cost-effective way for e-commerce projects to progress from an idea to a functioning reality.
Colyn points out that the dotcoza project was able to get up and running in six weeks, because "our data centre facilities were already in place and of a superior order. All we needed to do was install minimal equipment to link Cyber House to our New Doornfontein data centre.
Of course Telkom`s co-operation on the project was a major contributor, but UUNET SA implements networks according to a proven project management regime run by a strong contingent of experienced project managers. Our methodology worked. We were able to keep our promises to Andersen Consulting. "At the same time, we had the capacity to more than meet the project`s bandwidth and data management needs."
Earlier this year, UUNET SA added an extra asymetric E3 (34Mbps) of international bandwidth to its network. That, together with the acquisition of SDN, gives the company a total international capacity in excess of 128 Mbps. In addition, six E3 circuits were added to UUNET SA`s national network, making it the country`s most resilient Internet network."
The new E3 national circuits link UUNET SA`s two Johannesburg nodes (New Doornfontein and Victory Park) with its two Cape Town nodes (Newlands and Tygervalley) in a quadrangular format and provide dual high speed connections to the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX) for peering to other ISP`s.
"That sort of redundancy in the core of our network - over which we deliver IP bandwidth - ensures that no single point of failure can take the network down," says Colyn.
The dotcoza project had two specific requirements for the network. The first was that Andersen Consulting arranged a number of radio (5 FM) and TV programmes. These were calculated to raise public interest in the project and, therefore, were expected to cause spikes in bandwidth demand.
"On the two Sunday nights following the Carte Blanche programmes bandwidth demand reached 2 Mbps," says Colyn. "The network coped with them easily." The second requirement was 24-hour video streaming which allowed visitors to the website to follow dotcoza`s movements live through the house he lived and worked in.
Closed circuit television cameras were multiplexed to an encoder inside the house which sent a 38 kb video stream to Andersen Consulting`s broadcast server hosted at UUNET SA`s New Doornfontein data centre. From that server, UUNET SA guaranteed 3.5 Mbps of bandwidth in order to stream the video sound and pictures website visitors as they called for it.
"One of the difficulties with video streaming is that if the allocated bandwidth is inadequate the quality of the picture deteriorates progressively as more people call for video images. Our E3 (34 Mbps) core network enabled us to avoid that problem."
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