When a large enterprise launches a new business, it must make sure its infrastructure can support it—and grow along with the new venture. That's why Sun Direct TV Private Limited Network (not affiliated with Sun Microsystems) spent months preparing for the launch of its direct-to-home (DTH) satellite TV network, paying special attention to a billing and revenue management system that could support this new area of business.
Sun Direct management expected that the new Sun Direct TV network would gain new subscribers at a rapid rate, so the company needed a server solution that could offer high performance and reliability and easily scale up to support new subscribers and channel partners at a reasonable cost.
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The performance, scalability, availability, and productivity of the Sun Microsystems solution gives us a foundation that we can use for years to come, and we expect considerable savings on hardware and energy costs
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— Tony D'Silva, Chief Operating Officer, Sun Direct TV
Sun Direct uses Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (OBRM) which call center representatives, channel partners, and internal staff can all access through a browser. Through the Interactive Self Care component, new subscribers can log on and set up an account. Channel partners then take that information from the site to provision the new customers. People inside the organization use the data for a variety of business purposes, from accounting to marketing.
The company considered solutions from IBM, HP, and Sun Microsystems. Because Sun Direct has long been a satisfied customer—and more importantly, because Sun Microsystems presented a solution that offered the highest scalability—the company chose the Sun solution. To ensure that the solution could effectively work with the Oracle application and the company's SAP software, the Sun Microsystems team worked closely with Siemens Information Systems Limited, a Sun partner and leading systems integrator, to deliver a complete end-to-end solution.
The team deployed an enterprise-strength, highly available, scalable server platform in a tiered cluster environment that includes two Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers with two dual-core 2.15GHz SPARC64 processors and an attached Sun StorageTek 6140 modular array with 6.3 TB of storage. The solution also relies on one Sun Fire V245 server and three Sun Fire T2000 servers with eight-core, 32-thread USTI processors. The solution's software includes the Solaris 10 Operating System and uses the Solaris Cluster 3.2 framework to extend the high availability features of Solaris. In addition, a Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 server with four dual-core SPARC64 processors will be added soon.
Sun Managed Operations(Sun MoD) part of Sun Managed Services, provides 24x7 proactive monitoring of the M5000-based cluster, the storage, and Solaris operating system, which frees Sun Direct's IT team to focus on other critical needs. Sun MoD gives the customer with quick notification of alerts on the system. It also performs system administration tasks, monitors storage health, and storage management.
The initial deployment was completed during two weeks in August 2007, leaving SunTV ready for the December 2007 launch of its DTH offering. The infrastructure supports the current customer base and can expand substantially to support a large subscriber base through the vertical and horizontal scaling of Sun Microsystems servers. In addition, Sun Direct is using the virtualization capabilities of Logical Domains (LDoms) to separate CPU, memory, and other hardware components into a virtual server, essentially creating a server within a server. As a result, Sun Direct can reduce both hardware needs and costs.
For example, Sun Direct expects to see lower space and power costs, based on the minimized footprint and the energy efficiency of the Sun solution. Sun Microsystems uses a SWaP metric (based on space, watts, and industry-standard benchmarks for performance) to compare server solutions. In this case, the
Sun Fire T2000 servers together provide a total rack-space savings of at least 8 rack units and a power-consumption savings of at least 2,800 watts, compared to competitive servers, to generate 3,959 SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS).
Sun Direct is experiencing high availability levels of 99.99 percent and good server utilization rates, and with the energy savings and performance it has achieved, it expects the Sun Microsystems solution to serve the company well for years to come.
