A2Pay, a local vendor of virtual prepaid vouchers for essential services, has announced its standardisation on Stratus Technologies infrastructure for the running of its mission critical line of business systems.
“Because our business keeps unusual hours,” explains Rob Roux, A2Pay CEO, “and assists in the delivery of essential services such as electricity, cellular and terrestrial telecommunications to customers in rural, underprivileged regions of South Africa, the uptime of our core transaction processing systems is non-negotiable.
“Considering that we conduct an average of 34 000 transactions per day, and the vast majority of these transactions take place between 4pm and 8pm in the evenings and between 6am and 8am in the mornings, even a couple of minutes' downtime can have a catastrophic effect, not only on our earnings, but on our customers' lives,” Roux says.
“For that reason, we needed the best possible solution for our continuous availability needs,” he says.
The one challenge the company faced, however, was that traditionally speaking, its mission-critical systems would have required separate distinct continuous availability servers and as such, cost way more than A2Pay was prepared to spend.
“Since Stratus' solutions now support virtualisation, however,” Roux adds, “we could move multiple mission-critical systems onto a single platform and possibly still have the headroom to place other important applications onto the continuous availability solution, thus guaranteeing the entire organisation of constant uptime.”
From its initial goal of moving its domain controller, transaction server, communications platform and database server onto a combination of Stratus' FTServer and FTStorage, Roux says A2Pay has provisioned a total of 12 virtual machines on the Stratus hardware and successful virtualised everything from its e-mail servers to its Web servers on the new platform.
“And amazingly we're still only using less than 50% of the capacity the new solution affords us,” he enthuses, “giving us the assurance that there's more than enough headroom for growth of our offering.”
Roux says the solution has been live since the beginning of February 2010 and from the first day it went live, has exceeded expectations.
“A2Pay has managed to free up our IT resources substantially since moving to Stratus infrastructure and successfully managed to re-deploy the time and effort its IT department previously spent on managing the hardware infrastructure on the management and continual evolution of its software,” says Pieter van der Merwe, availability solutions architect at Stratus Technologies.
“And with the anticipated exponential growth the company anticipates for the second half of 2010, it should have every confidence that its investment in Stratus' solutions will continue to reap rewards,” he adds.
“We have confidence in our hardware platform and realise our availability concerns are behind us,” Roux says.
“That allows us to focus on our core business and drive ever more innovative virtual prepaid offerings into the market,” he concludes.
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