Case Study

Industry : 4G Telecommunications, India

Objective : Deploy over 200,000 Cloud Wifi access points for 4G Wifi Offload, requiring high availability and disaster recovery for management.

Challenges:
  • Scale: In phase 1, over 200 thousand access points to be managed as part of a multi-tiered scale out infrastructure.
  • Unavailability of IOPS requirement at this scale which necessitated building test infrastructures, to make appropriate design decisions.
  • Strict RTO / RPO requirements.
  • Infrastructure had to be split across 2 sites.
  • Wifi Cloud Service application stack was not designed for DR across multiple sites.
  • Coordinating with multiple teams, business units, vendors and managed service providers for infrastructure services.
  • Accessibility: unavailability of internet connectivity and/or remote access.
  • Multi-year deployment.

Solutions

The infrastructure was split across 2 sites, where each site acts as recovery site for the other and vice-a-versa. Each site was configured with N+1 redundancy. The entire infrastructure was built using Vmware vSphere and SRM. Beyond the design and deploy, the The real benefit that Smartedge brought to the project was a unified orchestrated failover. We not only helped the customer achieve strict RPO / RTO in fact we bettered them.

Benefits:

The entire project lasted over 2+ years. This included assessment, design, deployment and documentation. Team Smartedge executed all the stages of assessment, design, deployment and documentation.

  • Timely and successful completion of all project activities.
  • Unified DR orchestration.
  • Team Smartedge worked with the engineering team of the Cloud Wifi Service provider to add capability to the product’s virtual appliance for improved first boot and failover capabilities.
  • Reduction in RTO / RPO.
  • Defined a POD architecture which the customer can use to replicate this infrastructure to scale out up to 1 million access point management.
  • Complete documentation including Conceptual Design, HLDs, LLDs and As-Built documents.
  • Conducted knowledge transfer to customer support team for Day 2 operations.