Casema

Telco Reduces Maintenance and Energy Costs for Self-Service Portal with Sun CoolThreads Servers

Casema is a major provider of cable television, Internet and telephone services in the Netherlands. Casema has connections in approximately 1.4 million homes and about 800 employees.

Download the PDF

Customer Challenges

Maintain high standards of customer service
Enable rapid customer and business growth
Bring new services to market faster
Control operating costs

Solution

Casema launched its new self-service Web portal on a power-efficient Sun server and operating platform.

Business Results

Reduced server maintenance and management costs
30% less power consumption than comparable servers
40% smaller datacenter space footprint than comparable servers
Improved server capacity
Established scalable infrastructure for cost-effective growth

Products and Services

Story Details

Casema is one of the largest cable operators and fastest-growing providers of network services and entertainment in the Netherlands. With over 20,000 kilometres worth of underground cabling, the company adds between 3,000 and 4,000 new Internet, telephony and digital television connections each week for consumer and business customers.

To maintain growth in the dynamic telecommunications marketplace, Casema over the past several years has standardized the infrastructure for its business-critical UNIX applications and related databases on Sun Fire servers running the Solaris Operating System. Goals of the standardization effort include reduced maintenance and administration costs, as well as the scalability and flexibility required to support business growth and steadily add new services.

" We selected Sun Fire T2000 servers for this environment because they are ideally suited for Web and self-service applications. They meet our architectural specifications, offer high computational capacity and are able to effortlessly handle the required workload. At the same time, they use less energy and occupy less space than other servers in their class. "

— Aad van Boven, Senior Manager, IT Operations, Casema

At the beginning of 2006, Casema launched a new self-service portal based on 12 Sun Fire T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System and Oracle Database 10g Release 2. The servers are based on the Sun UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology. They offer Casema optimal use of the Solaris 10 Operating System and breakthrough price-performance while reducing the costs associated with power consumption, cooling and datacenter space.

“We selected Sun Fire T2000 servers for this environment, because they are ideally suited for Web and self-service applications,” says Aad van Boven, Senior Manager IT Operations at Casema. “They meet our architectural specifications, offer high computational capacity, and are able to effortlessly handle the required workload. At the same time, they use less energy and occupy less space than other servers in their class.”

van Boven adds: “With an ever growing numbers of servers and storage systems, saving space, reduction of power consumption and reduction of heat generation are all keys to cost-effective operational management. Deploying the new T2000 saved Casema money to invest back into our datacenter and also helped the IT team meet the ambitious deadline of the project.”

Casema has deployed an additional 25 Sun Fire T2000 servers for development and testing purposes. Solaris 10 OS helps the IT team efficiently manage and maximize the utilization of the production, development and test servers. Solaris also provides the highest levels of reliability, availability and security to support the 24x7 operation of the customer-facing portal.

“The cornerstones of our standardization policy are availability, security and flexibility that makes systems future-proof,” says van Boven. “Sun gives us all that with Sun Fire servers and Solaris 10. We now have a highly scalable and manageable environment in place to which we can quickly add new capacity. We expect traffic on our portal to grow 30-40% over the next year, and the T2000 servers give us plenty of headroom to support that growth.”