Customer Success

Warid Telecom (Pvt.) Ltd.

Reducing Storage Management Costs by 50% at one of Pakistan’s
Fastest-Growing Telecommunications Providers

Why rely on multiple storage management and high availability solutions when ORGANIZATION PROFILE

one alone can achieve more for half the cost? It’s a straightforward question, and Website: www.waridtel.com
Industry: Telecommunications
one that it didn’t take Warid Telecom long to answer. This fast-growing Pakistan
Headquarters: Pakistan
mobile communications provider has recently deployed a new highly available
server and storage infrastructure. The old environment used clustering solu-
symantec SolutionS
tions from both Symantec and Sun to support the UNIX and Windows platforms, Data Protection

but it made sense to standardize on one solution for the new infrastructure―as High Availability
Storage Management
long as it offered the required availability, functionality, and performance. The
answer to Warid Telecom’s question lay with Veritas Storage Foundation HA
5.0, the bundle of Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server from
Symantec, which has enabled the company to reduce its support services costs Why Symantec?
by 50 percent over three years. It also ensures the company benefits from the
· Most flexible HA/
high availability of the billing system and other critical platforms.
DR solution on the
market, coping
A predominant force in Pakistan mobile communications
equally with any
Having completed four successful years of operation, during which the company moved from con- operating system or
ceptual infancy to a market challenger, Warid Telecom Pakistan enters its fifth year as a predomi- hardware platform
nant force in the business and consumer mobile communications market. Warid Telecom is a joint · More stable than
venture between Abu Dhabi Group, one of the largest business groups in the Middle East and the
other cluster
single largest foreign investor in Pakistan, and SingTel Group, which acquired a 30 percent equity
stake in the company for US$758 million. solutions on
the market
The rate of change in the Pakistani mobile communications market is such that technology strate- · Industry-proven in
gies crafted several years ago may no longer be sufficient to meet the explosive rate of growth in
the data center
subscribers and the corresponding data volumes. Such was the case with Warid Telecom. To
sufficiently meet customers’ needs, roll-out and support compelling mobile services in the shortest · First class local
possible time with maximize efficiency, the company made the decision to implement a new
support in Pakistan
technology infrastructure.
 Customer Success Warid Telecom (Pvt.) Ltd.

In the past, the company’s critical systems―

SolutionS at a glance Business Value and
such as billing and data warehousing―resid-
ed on a hardware-intensive and relatively Business Drivers
Technical Benefits
siloed storage environment. Warid Telecom • Reduce the cost of managing data Cost Savings
recognized that a new infrastructure com- • Ensure high quality customer service and • Reduced the cost of storage management
prising both its UNIX and Microsoft Windows uninterrupted mobile services by 50% over three years
environments would not only help reduce the
cost of managing storage, but also provide
Technology Challenges Data Protection
the flexibility and availability needed to
• Rationalize overlapping storage manage- • Ensured uninterrupted services to millions
quickly adapt to the fast changing conditions ment toolset of telecommunications customers
in the Pakistan mobile communications mar-
• Support multiple operating systems • Met business recovery time objectives by
ket. Now, core billing applications (named
automating backup and recovery
TABS) run on the Solaris platform with Oracle,
whereas the local IT infrastructure has been Symantec Products
• Veritas NetBackup™ 6.5, with the following High Availability
built on a Windows platform with Oracle/SQL
server. Agent: • Ensured high availability of billing system
– NetBackup agent for Oracle and other critical platforms

Maintain simultaneous high • Veritas Storage Foundation™ HA 5.0 for • Introduced application clustering in sup-
UNIX (Solaris) and Windows port of high availability
availability across UNIX and
Windows – Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 • Automated failover on multiple, heteroge-
neous clusters
– Veritas Cluster Server 5.0
Sameer Jameel, enterprise systems manager • Ensured path failure protection and fast
• Veritas Storage Foundation™ for failover
at Warid Telecom, explains the technical Oracle RAC
background to the problem. “We were expe-
riencing upgrade issues with the operating Efficiency
Technology Environment
systems-specific file systems,” he says. “Ow- • Very high backup jobs success rate
• Hardware: SUN® Sparc® Enterprise M9000/
ing to the heterogeneous nature of the envi- M4000, SUN StorageTek® 9990v Storage, • Centralized management of storage
ronment, cross-platform migration was slow, SUN StoreEdge 6500 storage, SUN SL-3000
complex, and demanded excessive resources, tape library
Flexibility
while there were limitations to maintaining • Operating Systems: Solaris 10 SPARC,
• Delivered unified online storage manage-
equally high availability simultaneously Solaris 10 x86, Solaris 9 SPARC, Microsoft®
ment for UNIX and Windows
across both the UNIX and Windows plat- Windows® 2003 Enterprise
• Provided measurably greater visibility,
forms.” • Applications: Oracle® RAC 10g, Oracle
control, and flexibility over mission-critical
database 10g, Oracle ERP solution
applications and storage
In terms of clustering, the existing environ- • Servers: Up to 50 SUN Blade servers, SUN
ment was using a combination of both Veritas x2100 & x4100 servers, Dell® PowerEdge
midrange servers
Storage Foundation HA and Solaris Cluster.
• Replication: Hitachi array-based Universal
In tandem, Veritas™ NetBackup™ from
Replicator Software for SAN to SAN Data
Symantec™ was being used on both the old replication
and the new environment for rigorous data
protection. “Consolidation was our watch-
word,” Sameer Jameel explains. “We wanted
one unified solution for online storage man-
agement, across both Solaris and Windows,
and across all the deployed storage devices Storage Foundation and Cluster Server are “Why use two separate storage
and arrays. By centralizing the management quite simply the most flexible storage man- management products when a
of different applications, servers, and stor- agement and HA/DR solution on the market,
age Warid Telecom would benefit from in- coping equally with any operating system or single Symantec solution can
creased operational efficiency and complete hardware platform. They are more stable achieve more for half the cost? ”
visibility.” than other cluster solutions on the market
and industry-proven in the data center. Sameer Jameel
So why did this leading mobile communica- Coupled with this is the fact that NetBackup Enterprise Systems Manager
tions provider standardize on the Symantec is a best of breed backup and recovery solu- Warid Telecom
clustering solution and not the one from Sun? tion, we were very pleased with our existing
Sameer Jameel continues, “In our opinion, experience with Symantec, and the local sup-
 Customer Success Warid Telecom (Pvt.) Ltd.

“In our opinion, Storage Foundation port is first class. All of these factors com- To complement this top-flight online storage
and Cluster Server are quite simply bined made Symantec our number one management and high availability solution,
choice.” Warid Telecom is using NetBackup. It offers
the most flexible storage management Warid Telecom a single platform to manage,
and HA/DR solution on the market, Comprehensive portfolio of Storage protect, and recover the critical data across
coping equally with any operating Foundation agents and options storage tiers and the Sun Solaris and Win-
dows operating systems. This reduces the
system or hardware platform. They In its new environment, Warid Telecom is us- complexity and operational costs of protect-
are more stable than other cluster ing Veritas Storage Foundation HA ―includ- ing, recovering, and archiving data. “With
solutions on the market and industry- ing Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle® the simplified and centralized management
RAC ―to support the online storage manage- provided by the NetBackup Platform, Warid
proven in the data center. ” ment and clustering of its TABS billing sys- Telecom is able to customize its data protec-
tem, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and tion infrastructure based on the application
Sameer Jameel other critical applications. Cluster Server requirements. For example, data protection,
Enterprise Systems Manager has enabled Warid to reduce their hardware retention, and recovery requirements can be
Warid Telecom expenditure by provisioning N+1 and N+M automated with predefined storage life-cycle
clusters; thus providing best high availability policies that correspond to the service levels
to their mission critical applications while we need to achieve,” says Sameer Jameel.
saving on power, space and other resources.
Among many tasks, the solution enables The NetBackup agent for Oracle adds an-
Sameer Jameel and his team to grow or re- other dimension to this environment―
claim capacity on storage volumes and file streamlining and simplifying the manage-
systems, provision storage online to new ap- ment of the Oracle environment. “To optimize
plications, and automate tasks such as re- the performance and efficiency of backup
configurations and resizing. They can also and recovery time objectives, we use the
migrate data between operating systems, NetBackup agent for Oracle. This agent re-
making the data accessible on the most ef- quires fewer resources from the server/ap-
ficient platform. plication and is very dynamic to configure,”
says Sameer Jameel.
Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC from
Symantec is also deployed to manage Warid The solution is saving money too. By elimi-
telecom’s highly available Oracle Real Ap- nating the Solaris Cluster and standardizing
plication Clusters (RAC) databases. It cur- on the blend of Storage Foundation and
rently supports a three-node RAC cluster on NetBackup, Warid Telecom has been able to
the Sun M9000 platform and will shortly sup- reduce its support services costs by 50 per-
port a two-node RAC cluster on the M4000 cent over three years. “Why use two separate
platform. The result is a single management storage management products when a single
view for each of the database and storage Symantec solution can achieve more for half
management tasks―on any of the company’s the cost?” he says.
hardware platforms. “The great thing about
Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC is that we
are able to choose the most appropriate op-
erating system and storage hardware for
Warid Telecom, without needing to worry
about the management consequences. The
solution also helps reduce system downtime
and increases scalability by performing tasks
dynamically,” says Sameer Jameel.

Copyright © 2009 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, Veritas, NetBackup, and Storage Foundation are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its
affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. All product information is subject to change without notice. Part Number 20049011