About Customer
The customer is a large 4G service provider in India. It operates a national LTE network with coverage across all 22 telecom circles. It does not offer 2G or 3G service, and instead uses only voice over LTE to provide voice service on its 4G network.
Requirement
A large Cloud Wifi Service provider was supplying the wireless access points to this telco for building a 4G Wifi Offload solution, the plan in the initial phase was to deploy over two hundred thousand access points. It was desired to provide high availability and disaster recovery capability to management stack used for managing these access point. For this VMware vSphere was selected as the virtualization platform along with VMware SRM for building the DR solution. Smartedge Technologies was selected by this Cloud Wifi Service provider to build this vSphere infrastructure required for managing over two hundred thousand access points.
Smartedge Technologies was involved as part of this project right from design to documentation to handover of the infrastructure to the end customer.
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 neccessiated builidng 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.
Solution
The infrastructure was split across 2 sites, where each sitye 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 ad deploy, the real benefit that Smartedge brought to the project was a unified orchestrated failover. We not only helped the customer achieve strict RPO / RTO infact 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 activties.
- 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 achitecture which the customer can use to replicate this infrastructure to scale out upto 1 million access point management.
- Complete documentation including Conceptual Design, HLDs, LLDs and As-Built documents.
- Conducted knowledge transfer to customers support team for Day 2 operations.