NETWORK IP OFFERS SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE WITH HP"Our decision to go with the XP256 and the HP 9000 N4000 was the best decision we've made to date. It has definitely given us the IT infrastructure to grow as big as we want." -- Stephan Broquie, Director, Information Systems, NetworkIP Challenges:
Solution
Results
HP takes the CallToday's telecommunications industry is a pressure cooker of burgeoning technology, explosive regulatory changes and aggressive entrepreneurial approaches. In fact, the BT World Communications Report 1998/99, which represents the view of more than 1,000 of the world's top business directors, reported that "technology is the driving change and that information will be the main strategic weapon of the next decade, with telecoms playing a critical role." NetworkIP, an application service provider of converged telecommunication and Internet services, is one such company. The company is focused on providing Business to Business (B2B) service applications, enabling other companies to deliver market-enhanced, value added services through innovative software and industry-leading technology. Like other application service providers (ASPs), NetworkIP faced both new opportunities and challenges in this highly competitive environment. It called on Hewlett-Packard Company to help it meet these challenges and take advantage of the opportunities. Challenges of Growth Puts Performance on Hold"Our customers are telecom distributors who need to be able to access our Web site to submit queries and run reports," explained Stephan Broquie, Director of Information Services, NetworkIP. "They pull data from call record details which in turn provides them with information on their end-users' service usage." In May 1999, NetworkIP experienced tremendous growth in its database, which, in turn led to a shortage of capacity and storage. It also prompted a need for a faster server to drive the database. The company was running on the HP 9000 D- and R-Class Enterprise Servers with HP AutoRAID disk arrays for storage. Broquie noted, "This was fine for just storing data, but not adequate to fulfill the performance we needed. Our database was growing at a rate of almost one gigabyte a day! At that rate, I couldn't keep up with adding drives to the HP AutoRAID. We had to archive older call record details just to store new ones." Tapping into Greater Capacity, Enhanced PerformanceAfter looking at several competitive systems, NetworkIP turned to HP for a solution. "We already had HP in house and they offered us the best solution, together with Informix as the database, for our data warehouse," Broquie said. NetworkIP upgraded its HP 9000 R-Class servers to two new HP 9000 N4000/4- way Enterprise Servers for core processing and purchased an HP SureStore E Disk Array XP256 to meet its storage needs. "We were one of the first customers to install both an XP256 and the N4000," boasted Broquie. "The XP256 provided us with a very scalable solution, as far as our data warehouse needs, as well as high speed performance in terms of I/O and data retrieval. It clearly offered us the most flexibility." NetworkIP also is using an HP 9000 L-Class 4-way Enterprise Server running the Netscape Enterprise Server software for its Web server. Originally its Web server had been based on Microsoft Windows NT, however, with help from HP Consulting the company made the transition to HP-UX. In addition, NetworkIP has four HP 9000 R-Class servers for its call processing servers, as well as two HP 9000 D-Class servers that are connected to Nortel switches collecting call record details. Dialing into to Data Warehouse DemandsNetworkIP keeps four months of call record detail accessible to its customers; older data is moved into tape archives. According to Broquie, the company currently has approximately 1 TB of raw data. The data warehouse utilizes an Informix database, selected for its alignment with the Nortel data switches. "The data is growing rapidly because of the increasing number of customers. It's good for our company, but painful for IT!" he added. "To ensure we have fault tolerance on the call processing side, we have multiple servers processing the call record details: an N+1 type of architecture." HP Answers the CallWhen it comes to service and support, NetworkIP never gets a busy signal from HP. "As a vendor, HP has been very response to our needs. HP's technical support has been great, and we have been very satisfied with the price/performance of the HP servers," Broquie noted. "In every single instance, HP has found a solution to our business issues." He concluded, "Our decision to go with the XP256 and the HP 9000 N4000 was the best decision we made all year. It has definitely given us the infrastructure to grow as big as we want." At-a-Glance: Name: Network IP Headquarters: Longview, Texas Founded: 1997 1999 Revenues: $68 Millions Employees: 25 Telephone: 800-605-2577 World Wide Web Site: www.networkip.net Product Description: NetworkIP is a Business to Business (B2B) application service provider that allows it's service providers to access and control all of their operations over the Internet. It provides converged telecommunication and Internet services to services providers. It offers four main services: Prepaid local/long distance (800 access): Prepaid long distance (1+ access): Prepaid calling card services; and Internet, local and long distance services for Cable/DSL/ISP service providers. Technology Highlights
|
Previous Article | Table of Contents | Next Article