WaveCrest is a global communications company that offers wholesale and hosted retail telephony services. It switches over 300 million minutes a month of telephony traffic, generating an annual turnover of £130m. The success of the company depends on high-performance systems that provide an integrated back-office and help WaveCrest stay ahead in the competitive telecoms market.
Tim French, Vice President Network & IT Systems, WaveCrest. “Our primary goal was to update and simplify our server infrastructure and in the process, make it easier to manage. At the same time, we wanted to reduce power consumption and space utilisation. That’s why we chose Foundation IT to implement HP’s BladeSystem blade servers. We’ve been very impressed by Foundation IT’s approach and the manageability and reliability of the new architecture.”
WaveCrest’s suite of applications and database systems was very advanced, but its server infrastructure was increasingly unfit for purpose. It consisted of more than 80 stand-alone servers at two sites with approximately 20TB of storage. Many of the servers were out of warranty, underpowered and slow. Failure meant that WaveCrest could not turn to the original vendor for support resulting in the server support team working hard just to keep everything ticking over.
The right platform for growth
The company had major plans for growth and turned to Foundation IT, a Berkshire-based IT solutions specialist to advise them on a complete overhaul of their server and storage environment. “We recommended HP c-Class blades and Dell EqualLogic ISCSI SAN’s as the optimal platform,” explains Adam Start, of Foundation IT.
Foundation IT worked with WaveCrest to design a mirrored data centre arrangement that split the workload between two data centres, with the two sites linked by high-bandwidth fibre-optic links. This design meant that both sites could operate independently whilst offering complete redundancy in the event of isolated systems failure or complete site outage. Each site now has three racks and a mix of full and half-height Intel powered quad core HP blade servers. Thanks to virtualisation, approximately 14 physical servers can now do the work of the previous 80 servers, providing solid foundations for future expansion.
Foundation IT also recommended HP Virtual Connect for the HP BladeSystem. This software dramatically simplifies Ethernet cabling and allows administrators to add or replace servers without having to reconfigure the cabling.
“I have to give Foundation IT a lot of credit”, says Tim French, “They did a great job.”
Virtual servers = real benefits…
The new infrastructure has brought WaveCrest demonstrable benefits:
It has allowed the company to reduce the rent it paid for floor space in its data centres. Using industry rules of thumb, French estimates that using HP blade servers has saved the company approximately £115,000 a year in rental alone.
“Blade servers simplified our physical infrastructure”, says Tim French. “For example, thanks to Virtual Connect, instead of spaghetti wiring, we have just four 10Gb Ethernet connections from each enclosure, which not only simplifies cabling but provides us with greater flexibility.” This more powerful and flexible infrastructure is also much simpler to manage, freeing up his IT team to deal with more important jobs and supporting the business’s expansion.
Another goal of the upgrade was a reduction in power consumption. Switching from 80 stand-alone servers to just 14 blade servers and 27 racks to just 6 means a major reduction in power consumption.
Even though there are fewer physical devices, the overall system is much more powerful.“Previously we had performance bottlenecks at times, especially when a system failed and we had to catch up when it came back online,” says Tim French. “The new system can ride out minor hiccups like this and, in any case, it delivers much greater performance overall.”
Tim French is very happy with the new system. “Simplification means less to go wrong and only a few places to look if it does. Overall, there’s a massive improvement in performance and manageability with huge savings in space and hosting infrastructure ,” he concludes.
About the Technology
The HP c-Class Blade System with Virtual Connect technology was coupled with VMware VI3 Enterprise virtualisation software and Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage to provide a powerful, flexible but manageable platform.
The secondary data centre is linked to the primary site by 10Gb/s fibre connections, so although physically remote, the two sites behave like a large single data centre. This blurring of the local/remote boundaries provides some unusual options and opportunities, and consequently the project had to resolve some unique challenges to reap the full benefits of this enormously powerful and flexible architecture.
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