Finecom Telecommunications, a Swiss full service provider for Internet, telephony, and digital TV, wanted to speed up the management of individual information TV channels for cable operators. It replaced dedicated physical servers with “swissV” from netrics hosting, which uses Hyper-V virtualization technology. A new TV information channel now takes less than 30 minutes to deliver on a self-service basis, instead of up to two weeks.
Business Needs
Finecom Telecommunications is the second-largest full service provider for cable operators in Switzerland. It offers its customers a range of services—including Internet access, telephony, and digital and interactive TV and radio. Finecom operates as the backbone for 15 independent cable providers. It supplies around 200,000 households in 230 boroughs with its multimedia product called Quickline for high-speed broadband Internet, telephony, and digital TV.
Service providers’ networks are straining under an ever-increasing load of multimedia traffic—and Finecom is no exception. Every local cable provider supported by Finecom operates its own individual TV information channel but this involved manual intervention and high operating costs. Finecom needed to find a better way of managing content than through its existing dedicated server environment at its head office in Biel-Bienne.
Hans-Martin Oetiker, Chief Operations Officer, Finecom Telecommunications, says: “We needed to speed up the process for provisioning a server with new content. With the customer on one site and our service on another, it could take anything from two days to two weeks to make the required changes. Provisioning of modems and routers was also taking much longer than our customers wanted, and we needed to remain competitive on price.”
Finecom was interested in exploring the potential of cloud-based computing to replace several parts of its traditional physical server environment. The pooling of network resources, and even separate networks, through virtualization can deliver sophisticated capabilities—such as increasing bandwidth in one part of the network—instantly. Virtualization simplifies data-center design and management of networks to lower operational expenses while also capping the cost of expanding available services. It also significantly reduces energy consumption.
Solution
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner netrics hosting launched swissV in the second quarter of 2010. It was the first Swiss local cloud service for virtual servers based on the Hyper-V virtualization feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. This was an opportunity for Finecom to use the solution to offer a better service to cable operators. As a Microsoft partner with hosting competencies, netrics hosting developed the product with Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, which helps network service providers dynamically pool, allocate, and manage virtualized resources to offer infrastructure-as-a-service to their customers.
Pascal Schmid, Chief Executive Officer, netrics hosting, says: “swissV is a fully automated virtualization environment based on a highly modern infrastructure using cloud services. netrics hosting designed it for the highest availability and it therefore relies on the failover functionality of Microsoft cluster technology. If a hardware defect occurs at a physical host, the virtual servers are automatically and immediately transferred to a functional device.”
netrics hosting offers swissV in two packages—“standard” with 1 gigabyte of random access memory (RAM) and 30 gigabytes of storage, and “expert” with 2 gigabytes of RAM and 50 gigabytes of storage. Both work with Windows Server 2008 R2 in 32-bit or 64-bit editions. Fully customized packages will be available in by the end of 2010. By using swissV, Finecom is providing all its 15 partners with a hosted virtual server to manage its required content.
Microsoft System Center tools help ensure that administrators can control the virtual server easily and independently from any helpdesk. The core comprises Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, which deploys servers, and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 for end-to-end management.
Benefits
swissV has helped Finecom reduce IT costs, increase server efficiency, and create a dynamic and reliable infrastructure for its existing content management service to cable operators. The clients themselves decide about the set up of their individual servers—from main memory to required disk space—without the need for manual intervention. Oetiker says: “The stand-out feature of the new environment using Hyper-V is that customers can set up channels themselves. It takes less than 30 minutes before the content is provided and everything is working.”
Companies share the same hardware resources. The hosted virtual server helps companies to share the same high-end components from HP, which are replaced on a three-year cycle. Schmid says: “Client data is secure—a principal advantage of private local cloud services in general.”
Customers avoid the need to invest in IT infrastructure. swissV is a cost-effective choice from Finecom because it uses the software-as-a-service financial model. Oetiker says: “We have a highly available virtualized solution, but without the need to invest massively in IT infrastructure and its constant renewal to provide new products and services.”
Cable operators get faster service. Instead of waiting up to two weeks for updates to physical servers, the cable operators now receive them in 30 minutes or less. Oetiker says: “An example of this is that netrics hosting provided Finecom with a virtual server solution using Hyper-V on the very day we made the inquiry.”
Hyper-V offers scope for pre-loaded functions. The solution gives Finecom the opportunity to offer its customers pre-loaded functions that developers can customize for individual cable operators, depending on the specific requirements of each cable operator.
swissV offers energy-saving feature. As an option, each virtual server on swissV can be powered by “green electricity” from the Taubenloch hydraulic power facility in Switzerland, which generates energy without damaging the environment.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
