In N.Z., TelstraClear Grows Business on Sun Platform

For TelstraClear and Sun Microsystems, Friday 15 December 2006 was the target date. During the past two months, a dozen people had worked tirelessly around the clock — on a seemingly impossible deadline — to consolidate TelstraClear’s two mail platforms into one. All their hard work paid off: the ISP mail platform was successfully migrated over to a new system with no disruption to business operations.

TelstraClear provides a wide range of voice and data products and services to business, government, wholesale, and residential sectors across New Zealand. With the leading IP network in the country, TelstraClear has more than 400,000 customers, including a combined ISP customer base of around 300,000.

Company Name: TelstraClear Industry: Telecommunications Core Business Activity: To provide voice, data products, and customer service to business, government, wholesale, and residential sectors. Products/Services: Solaris 10 Operating System 24 Sun Fire T1000 and 8 Sun Fire T2000 Servers Sun Groupware Migration Toolkit Sun Java System Messaging Server Key Business Challenge: A history of mergers and acquisitions had left TelstraClear with two separate mail platforms. To support the growth of its ISP business, TelstraClear decided to consolidate its mail environment and refresh aging software and hardware assets. Key Business Results: A more robust, reliable, and secure mail environment 50 per cent cost reduction in some operating expenses A mail platform scalable for five-year growth Staff freed to focus on strategic initiatives Increase in operational efficiency of system Reduced datacentre space from four racks of infrastructure to little more than one

With its ISP business contributing significantly to its bottom line, TelstraClear turned to Sun to protect future revenues. The company wanted to consolidate its existing mail infrastructure to reap the operational and financial benefits of running one instead of two mail platforms.

TelstraClear’s two platforms, Clear.net and Paradise.net, were the result of a history of mergers and acquisitions. The platforms differed in terms of architecture and geography — Clear.net was managed out of Auckland, while Paradise.net was managed and hosted in Wellington. As the company continued to grow, the cost and complexity and costs of managing two mail platforms intensified.

Having previously worked with Sun to implement Sun Java System Messaging Server, Andrew Crabb, TelstraClear’s chief information officer, did not waver in calling upon Sun again to consolidate his company’s mail infrastructure.

“We looked at a number of competitive solutions, but found Sun’s offering answered our needs,” said Crabb.

A Growing TelstraClear Outgrows Mail Infrastructure
As part of the consolidation project, TelstraClear also needed to refresh both its hardware and software assets to scale for future growth. The company was growing rapidly and needed a new mail platform that would accommodate this growth for five years.

“Like all progressive businesses, we wanted to do whatever was required to protect our ISP revenue. It’s crucial that we have the very best technology in place to ensure consistent high-level service to our ISP customers,” said Crabb.

The biggest hurdle for TelstraClear was the physical act of migrating to a new platform, without impacting the customer experience. The company stipulated that the migration was to cause zero downtime.

Sun Delivers More than Just Technology
“We chose to work with the Sun team to consolidate our mail platform because they understood our business needs,” said Crabb. “Sun sees the wider picture from both a business operations and growth standpoint — not just what hardware we need to deploy.”

A deployment of Sun’s Java System Messaging Server at Clear.net had already set a baseline for the mail platform consolidation. This software is designed to improve the quality of service of the enterprise and ISP market, with the ability to scale to meet customer demands.

After a review of different server options, TelstraClear followed Sun’s recommendation to deploy Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers running Sun’s open source Solaris 10 Operating System. The deployment is designed to run across the infrastructure lifecycle spanning the development, testing, training, and production environments.

“The Sun Fire UltraSPARC T1 servers are ideal for ISPs like us, where datacentre space is a major consideration. They scale very well horizontally, allowing us plenty of room to grow,” said Crabb.

The Sun Fire T2000 server offers triple the throughput in half the size and with half the power of competing solutions. With a 32-thread processor consuming just slightly more wattage than a household light bulb, the Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology reduce power and heat demands on TelstraClear’s datacentre.

By running its mail platform on the Solaris 10 OS, TelstraClear is also able to take advantage of the virtualisation capabilities of the OS to improve system utilisation. The Containers functionality of Solaris 10 enables the company to run multiple, software-isolated applications on each of its UltraSPARC T1 servers, boosting performance and operational efficiency.

Sun Races the Clock to Keep TelstraClear Up and Running
TelstraClear officially approved its high-level design and business case in September 2006. The migration from Paradise.net to the new system was completed on 15 December 2006, with the migration of Clear.net completed more recently in February 2007.

“The timeframe we gave Sun to work with — from business case to production — was incredibly tight. We needed to be at full performance capability over the peak Christmas period,” said Crabb.

“The Sun team showed a commitment to do whatever it took to ensure the task was completed, even flying in the right staff from all over the world to make the migration successful,” the CIO said. “We couldn’t have asked for much more.”

The migration over to the UltraSPARC T1 servers and Solaris 10 was a success, with Crabb describing the experience as “seamless” and “incident-free”.

TelstraClear Comes Out Stronger for Future Growth
By working with Sun to consolidate its mail platform, TelstraClear reduced operational and maintenance costs.

“It was inefficient to purchase two sets of infrastructure for both of our platforms. Now, it’s just the one platform that we have to manage and maintain,” said Crabb.

Environmental footprint was another clear winner in the consolidation project, as TelstraClear was able to reduce datacentre space from more than four racks of infrastructure to a little more than a single rack. This also spins off to savings in power and air conditioning.

“On top of all the benefits on the operations side, we now only have to train staff on one Sun mail platform. Our new mail platform is very straightforward to grasp and our people have much more capacity to focus on developing strategic initiatives,” said Crabb.

More crucially, the new Sun mail platform provides TelstraClear with the bandwidth to continue to expand its business for five years, without needing to worry about server capacity.

TelstraClear has not experienced any issues within Sun’s hardware or messaging platform to date, with Crabb saying that he would not hesitate to work with the company again.

“Sun has provided us with a more secure and sustainable ISP platform and we expect that this partnership will continue into the future,” said Crabb.