In a market dominated by big players a small cable service provider has to make the right decisions, when it comes to ensuring the required accessibility, simplicity and scalability in the datacenter. And as provider of internet and TV services, Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug knows with certainty that several thousand subscribers will be in front row in case of downtime.
Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug has grown over time, both through organic growth and via mergers with several other local cable service providers. With a staff of only 5 employees they’re capable of servicing more than 4,800 Internet and 8,900 TV subscribers. The very high requirements and a strong expectation of future growth made it clear to Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug that they had to consolidate and upgrade their data center in the near future.
Quick reaction allowed plenty of time for decision making
The ability to react quickly to the upcoming requirements ensured that it was possible to carefully figure out exactly what requirements a new solution should be able to meet.
“First and foremost our data center solution has to be extremely stable when it comes to our critical applications. For our many thousands of subscribers access to the internet is dependent on the ability of the data center to keep on running these services. The solutions also have to be scalable and easy to operate and service,” says System Administrator Daniel Badeby when pointing out the requirements Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug had to the new data center. Meanwhile downtime had to be as minimal as possible during the process of migrating to the new data center solution.
The requirements specification was therefore thoroughly prepared before replacement and consolidation of the existing solution was initiated. This process was started when the old hardware platform could no longer support the latest updates of some of the critical business services.
Calculated choice of partner and technology vendors
With Conscia, Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug has designed and implemented a redundant and virtualized data center solution spread across two locations, and consisting of Cisco network and UCS servers, EMC storage and virtualization software from VMware. The three vendors already cooperate under the VCE brand, and the choice fell on them exactly because that specific vendor mix ensured the best possible integration in the data center across network, storage, server and virtualization.
Business critical services now run active/active across the two data centers, which means that they work independently of each other with 100% data consistency and without a single point of failure. For storage, asynchronous replication is used to ensure high performance, while the need for bandwidth is kept low.
Another future benefit of the solution is simplified management. Management of the solution is gathered in easy-to-use tools, which amongst other things makes it easy to quickly move or create new virtual machines, when the need arises. This makes it possible to, in fewer man-hours, operate the infrastructure and scale much more quickly in case of new subscribers.
Security through service agreement
Better documentation and simplification make the system manageable for more people than before. Operating the previous datacenter required very specific expertise and knowledge from Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug. The cable service provider is less vulnerable with the new solution, and it is now easier to get help with debugging from external sources if the need arises.
With Conscia as partner in every area of the data center upgrade, Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug has ensured that their partner have insight into all components of the data center. This has been an advantage, both when it comes to design and implementation but also moving forward, when it comes to expansion and servicing of the data center.
“The implementation went really well. With Conscia, we got the new setup up and running just as planned, even though it meant we had to burn the midnight oil,” says Daniel Badeby about the joint effort of putting the solution into operation, and continues: “In the future it’s a big plus for us that there’s only one number we need to call for help. This gives us security and confidence in the expectation that we can react to errors as quickly as possible.”
Kalundborgegnens Antennelaug has made a complete service agreement on the data center infrastructure, which allows for direct contact, 24/7, to Conscia’s experts. Meanwhile the service agreement offers a unique overview of all Cisco units in the data center, which makes it possible to foresee the need for hardware service before the actual need arises.
