CASE STUDY
Lorna Hardie , Regional Director Sub-Saharan
Africa , VMware
“ Virtualisation , therefore , brings with it a level of control and failover which we did not have previously . Moving away from a physical environment makes more sense , especially for mission-critical systems like IT and telecommunications . But we needed to find a partner that could make the virtualisation environment work according to our specific requirements ,” said Morais .
Competitive advantage
As part of this , the mobile operator sought to find the best possible way to maximise the utilisation of its existing rack mounted servers , derive cost savings , and provide the IT Systems Team the ability to better manage the expanding data centre environment .
The mobile market in Mozambique is very dynamic ( as is the rest of Africa ), requiring operators to respond quickly to competitors ’ service offerings . If an operator does not have agility in its data centre , the extended turnaround time to deliver a competitive service offering may be prohibitive on account of the installation and configuration of telco unique hardware / infrastructure to maintain relevancy to its customer base and demand .
“ We reached a point where we had to build a new smaller data centre . It made sense to go the virtualisation route . Unfortunately , the technology we selected was complex and difficult to use , and it also went down for several hours at a time on an almost daily basis . Because of this , many of the senior managers voiced their concerns about the merits of this strategy ,” said Eduardo Cid de Morais , IT Systems Manager , Vodacom Mozambique .
The implementation of a VMware multi-cloud infrastructure provides the quicker restoral of service from a downed virtual machine ( VM ) by simply connecting from a virtual private network ( VPN ) and powering it back on . Furthermore , monitoring is enhanced , allowing the organisation to view everything from within the operating system and preview how all the VMs are performing while effectively forecasting potential issues .
Lorna Hardie , Regional Director Sub-Saharan Africa , VMware , said : “ As one of Mozambique ’ s largest mobile networks , Vodacom Mozambique is demonstrating what can be achieved by embracing a virtualised environment that supports business continuity and high availability at scale . Vodacom Mozambique is ideally placed to meet the market demands for new services while leading the mobile digital revolution with its customers .”
Vodacom Mozambique transitioned from its previous provider , to work with VMware on a limited basis to modernise its virtualisation stack .
“ During the first two years of using VMware at a reduced capacity , we had a significantly more stable environment that proved it could comply with the rigorous standards of the Vodacom infrastructure requirements .
So , we decided to transition to the virtualised infrastructure of VMware . This entailed a comprehensive VMware implementation across the IT ( production ) cloud and then , our telco ( NFV ) cloud ,” he said .
The entire IT cloud has been fully virtualised to date . However , the desire to scale and shift to NFV was only approved in 2019 , with the transition currently in progress . Vodacom Mozambique is the first Vodafone subsidiary in Africa to deploy such a comprehensive virtualisation solution for its telco cloud .
“ VMware has enabled us to have a faster time to market because we can now deploy customer solutions as required . Our team has done tremendous work to come to grips with the technology and provide an integrated experience for our internal clients to develop products quicker ,” Morais said .
He added that VMware has enabled Vodacom Mozambique to transform its technology and networking approach . Previously , the business was using dozens of VMs , which has subsequently grown to thousands . Scalability like this could never even have been dreamt of with its previous environment .
“ The best part is , just a handful of people manage this entire virtualised footprint . We have an exceptionally skilled and diverse team that is split evenly across men and women ,” he said .
According to Morais , there aren ’ t many IT shops in Africa that can say their technical team isn ’ t male dominated – where at Vodacom Mozambique , the company believes in investing in only the best people for the job at hand .
52 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com