Cloud Hosting case study

The client, a major Australian telco, offers a variety of online media products to the consumer market. They needed a multi-tenanted data centre to host these products.

The key requirements for this Cloud Hosting project were:

• scalability and flexibility
• support for VMware server virtualisation
• support for storage virtualisation
• support for virtual and physical hosting

Best-of-breed technology, fast implementation

O2 Networks already had a successful long-term relationship with this client. We were brought in early to define networking requirements and came up with a number of different architectures which we then translated to conceptual designs.

The client selected one of these designs, which we proceeded to implement.

Our solution involved best of breed technology:

• F5 load balancing
• Cisco switching
• Juniper SRX firewalls

It features a multi-10 Gigabit backbone, capable of supporting thousands of VLANs, and many different firewall and routing virtual contexts. The platform's performance can be augmented without changing the underlying topology, and the data centre's infrastructure interfaces with the client's central management and operational infrastructure.

The design phase lasted 3 months, then build and testing took 6 months – extremely fast in the client's terms. The speed of completion of our project meant they could use it as a large part of the architecture for a cloud computing platform they were simultaneously developing.

A successful template for future projects

The data centre was one of the first Australian iterations of a technology of this nature, and one of the first customer-facing cloud deployments in Australia.

Since launch, there have been 15 different products successfully activated on the platform. These include pay-per-view sports and entertainment websites, a program to deliver content to remote areas, and a flagship product combining IPTV and PVR features.

O2 Networks is still supporting the platform, in particular migrating new applications. Meanwhile, the client is building similar POPs around Australia, using this design as a foundation template.