T-Mobile

Delivering Service Assurance Throughout Complex Data Centre Migrations.

Background

Following strong customer uptake in their mobile email messaging service, T-Mobile (UK) required additional capacity in order to meet the growing customer demand for its service. Its platform needed to be scaled to support 250,000 customers and the project demanded a multi-vendor platform skills set with solid IP networking not found within T-mobile's internal resource pool.

Through T-mobile's Technology partner, Ericsson, Foehn was appointed to provide high-level technical and consulting skills to the project and became closely involved in design, testing, deployment and support services for this revenue generating high availability, high volume mobile email messaging platform.

The Project

The upgrade of a live system is always challenging and T-Mobile's was no different. The company had launched its mobile email messaging service to customers a year earlier, had received a positive response from the market and the company was enjoying strong uptake of the service. Customers quickly began to rely on the service so responsiveness and high availability were paramount. In order to sustain the high service levels and support the rising number of subscribers the platform needed to be upgraded.

The project presented a number of challenges, however the critical elements revolved around migrating the existing infrastructure to a more scalable high performance system while providing the security and availability that T-Mobile had become accustomed to. In order to service 250,000 email accounts, the platform required a software upgrade and a migration to a scalable system with more processing power and storage. Foehn assessed what demands were to be placed on the new system and then provided T-Mobile (UK) with recommendations on what hardware upgrades should be made. Following agreement with the software vendor, Foehn proceeded with the planning for the deployment of the system and the migration of the existing data.

A key stipulation for the project was that interruption to the service had to be kept to a minimum while all upgrade work was done. This meant that planning was of paramount importance and the migration was to be performed during a window of low system activity in the early hours of the morning. These restrictions demanded a detailed and thorough project plan which Foehn developed. Every software element and every piece of hardware needed to be configured and fully tested before being deployed. To ensure the most rigorous of testing took place, Foehn created a replica environment that mirrored the existing T-Mobile platform. This included all the surrounding network elements to make sure that the simulation process was as close to the live environment as possible. Foehn spent a significant amount of time in the labs simulating all possible operational scenarios on the new platform, developing and writing testing scripts and refining the migration process in order to make sure that everything was appropriately configured for the migration of the live environment. Foehn also documented the exact steps and processes that were needed for the live deployment of each element so ensuring that nothing was missed and that there were no surprises on the day.

Each upgrade element was then planned into manageable steps that could be deployed and tested within the live environment within the allotted timeslot. Foehn planned a series of contingencies with strict version control processes that could be relied on to rapidly re-instate the operational system should something go wrong during an upgrade. This ensured that the risk was mitigated, downtime was minimised and operational availability was maintained at the 99.996% level. As a high profile email system, security was naturally of great importance for T-Mobile (UK). Because the system used a web-based front-end, the team needed to be doubly sure that no security breaches would be possible. To support this, Foehn deployed a high security, load-balanced firewall which it then maintained and monitored for T-Mobile (UK). With the security in place, Foehn started planning the hardware upgrade path and platform transition process.

Results

Once everything was in place and agreed with T-Mobile (UK), Foehn began the upgrade process. "Foehn did a great job in eliminating all of the unknowns so that when we gave the green light, we knew exactly what to expect. Their planning, testing and implementation procedures have been of the highest standard and this was demonstrated by the fact that upgrade did not disrupt normal services and customers were not even aware that a major upgrade had taken place." comments Michael Bradford, Senior Engineer of T-Mobile (UK).

Following the successful upgrade project, T-Mobile (UK) indicated that they wanted a single point of responsibility and contact for the operation and maintenance of the entire mobile email platform, which comprised a range of third party hardware and software products. Foehn was recognised as the ideal partner to provide the required level of technical knowledge across the multi-vendor platform. As a result, Foehn was sub-contracted to provide 24x7x365 operations and maintenance support to the complete mobile messaging platform.

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