SFR

French Telco Creates High-Performing Developer Platform in Three Months with Open-Source Sun Solution

French telco SFR is a global operator providing mobile and fixed-line services to individuals, businesses, and other telcos. Co-owned by Vodafone and Vivendi, the company is France’s largest mobile broadband network and the country’s second-largest cellular network with 20 million subscribers. SFR has approximately 10,000 employees and in 2008 had €11.5 billion in revenue.

Customer Challenges

Create production platform for developer initiative
Ensure that the platform can scale from tens to thousands of messages per second
Deliver highly available, secure service to customers
Maximize cost efficiencies using open-source technology

Solution

SFR chose Sun technologies to create the platform for its SFR Developer Zone Initiative. When establishing the production-grade platform, developers worked with a combination of Sun servers and storage, open-source software, and open-standards development tools. With the help of Sun support services, SFR delivered a high-performance, scalable platform six weeks ahead of schedule.

Business Results

Delivered a fully operational platform in three months
Developed a production environment with 40% greater performance
Gained a highly scalable solution to meet expected growth
Established a secure and stable platform
Reduced development costs with an open-source solution
Cut payback period by up to four years

Products and Services

Story Details

SFR, a French telco, operates in a highly competitive marketplace where pressure is higher than ever to maximize average revenue per user. To help boost income, the company launched the SFR Developer Zone Initiative, which opened up its APIs to business customers so they could create custom-made text and multimedia messaging, and location services. The telco would benefit from increased messaging traffic and data downloads.

For the plan to succeed, the company needed to replace an existing Java-based developer platform with a state-of-the-art solution that was robust and highly scalable. With a successful prototype created on Apache Tomcat, the company gave the go-ahead to migrate from the test infrastructure to a platform that could run in a production environment. Still, SFR gave developers a tight timeline and a number of objectives — namely, to create a reliable, secure, and commercially supported solution that continued using open-source software to maximize cost efficiencies.

" The real beauty of the Sun platform is that it enables us to start small but grow big. At the moment, the system handles 10 messages per second, but we are confident that it will scale to handle thousands of messages as demand increases. "

— Mohamed Ben Ali, Director of Internet Services, SFR

Sun offered the right combination of hardware and software to create a production-ready platform to meet the company’s needs. Mohamed Ben Ali, director of Internet services at SFR, says, “It was important for us that Sun is a leader in open-source technology and provides commercial support. Like SFR, it is also a promoter of shared innovation and community development.”

SFR developers set up six Sun SPARC Enterprise T5520 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System and connected to Sun StorageTek 2530 Arrays. The key advantage of choosing these servers was their suitability for highly expandable Web infrastructures and data-intensive applications. Furthermore, the storage arrays would scale easily with demand. Next, the team created the software infrastructure based on Java EE 5 and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server, using a clustered configuration. They also added the MySQL Enterprise Server, configured with MySQL Replication to achieve the required levels of high availability. By selecting the Platinum level of the MySQL Enterprise subscription, SFR enjoy the highest levels of production support, consulting and monitoring tools to deliver optimal performance, reliability, security, and uptime .

During development, the team used Metro Web Services for the Java Platform and the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) and took advantage of Spring and Hibernate frameworks in association with the NetBeans development environment and Hudson integration engine. Sun Java System Message Queue Enterprise Edition was used to facilitate communication between applications. Cyrille Manente, service delivery platform manager at SFR says, “We did not encounter any problem during the whole development stage. In particular, we found the GlassFish administration console really easy to understand.”

Sun Professional Services collaborated with SFR to maximize the speed of deployment. Sun provided onsite support and telephone assistance from technicians at Sun’s headquarters in California. Thanks to tight collaboration between SFR and Sun, the production environment was ready in just three months – six weeks ahead of schedule – saving time and money. Compared with the test platform, the production environment delivers approximately 40% greater performance, while being able to scale to accommodate thousands of messages a second. Crucially, by choosing an open-source solution, SFR could reduce development costs substantially. And despite the support costs, the company reckons it has cut the payback period on its investment by up to four years.

The SFR Developer Zone has maintained high availability since going live in November 2008, and the developer audience has provided positive feedback. “The combination of GlassFish and Solaris 10 OS ensures the solution is incredibly stable,” comments Mohamed Ben Ali.