Talkline

Success Story

Leading telecom services provider implements Novell® Business Continuity Clustering to meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements

Overview

Talkline is the third largest telecommunications services provider in Germany. The company offers competitive mobile phone services, as well as reseller contracts for the top mobile networks in Germany including T-Mobile, Vodafone and E-Plus. Talkline has 900 employees.

Challenge

Talkline is a subsidiary of the U.S.-based TDC Group, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. To comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, TDC needed Talkline to implement a business continuity solution that would keep its business operating in the event of a disaster. Talkline is a key contributor to TDC Group's revenue and any downtime within the company would be extremely costly. As a result, Talkline began searching for the best way to implement a business continuity solution within a year.

Novell solution

"The best part about our Novell/EMC solution is that it just works. We now have the peace of mind that if a data center is damaged or goes offline indefinitely, we know we can continue to conduct business."

Gerald Bleckat
Head of IT Networks
Talkline

Talkline selected Novell® Business Continuity Clustering, a high-availability, clustered server solution, to protect its business against site downtime. The Novell solution automates the configuration and management of geographically dispersed server clusters. In the event of an isolated server problem or data center disaster, users can continue to function without interruption.

"We have been Novell users for many years with great success," said Gerald Bleckat, head of IT Networks at Talkline. "Novell products are always stable and reliable so it just made sense to turn to them with our disaster recovery and business continuity needs."

Talkline implemented Novell Business Continuity Clustering in two data centers, approximately 10 kilometers apart. The Novell solution synchronizes a "cluster of clusters" so if one data center cluster goes offline for any reason, the other cluster will take over to ensure seamless access to file, print and e-mail services.

Each data center has 10 servers running on HP* DL380 G4 servers connected to one EMC CLARiiON* CX700 storage system. EMC MirrorView* is used to bi-directionally replicate the primary data volumes on each CX700 to secondary volumes on the other CX700. These two EMC CLARiiON systems can each handle up to 17 terabytes of data, enough capacity to support Talkline's environment for several years. The company can easily scale its business by adding more EMC storage capacity as needed.

"The Novell/EMC solution is a perfect combination and gives us real business continuity," said Bleckat. "Instead of implementing a disaster recovery solution that would restore data in a few weeks, we now have a comprehensive business continuity solution that enables us to get back up and running within hours of a disaster."

With one click, Talkline can easily move services, configurations and other essential data from one data-center cluster to another. These services may be server-based applications and databases, as well as those using native file access protocols of client workstations whether NetWare®, Windows*, UNIX*, Macintosh*, Linux* or Internet clients and servers.

If the event of server downtime, or during maintenance work, each cluster resource can failover to another, regardless of operating system. Novell and EMC developers have worked closely together to ensure automatic failover among NetWare, SUN Solaris* and IBM AIX* systems.

Talkline worked with Novell consultants to implement its comprehensive business continuity solution in nine months, within budget and without hiring additional IT resources. The company has also clearly documented its business continuity plan.

The new solution, while more complex, does not require additional administration time.

"We couldn't have met our deadlines without Novell ConsultingSM," said Bleckat. "The project risk would have been too high without their expertise. The consultants really knew the technology. Most important, we completed the implementation without any user disruption."

Talkline also benefits from the integration with Novell eDirectory™ which automates configuration and management processes to save time and reduce the potential for human error. Directory integration also provides security for both the cluster and user data.

Moving forward, Talkline plans to consolidate its mixed operating systems to NetWare, Novell Open Enterprise Server and Linux to further reduce administrative time and costs.

Results

With Novell Business Continuity Clustering and EMC data replication, Talkline has a comprehensive disaster recovery plan to get its business up and running within hours after a disaster. Talkline completed the project on time, within budget and without the need for additional personnel. The company also complies with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements of its parent company TDC Group and is the first of the TDC companies to fully implement a business continuity solution.

"The best part about our Novell/EMC solution is that it just works," said Bleckat. "We now have the peace of mind that if a data center is damaged or goes offline indefinitely, we know we can continue to conduct business."