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NOS Virtualizes Critical Applications

About NOS Comunicações

NOS is the largest communications and entertainment group in Portugal. It offers the latest-generation fixed and mobile solutions, television, internet, voice, and data for all market segments. It provides tailor-made solutions for each business sector and for businesses of different sizes, complementing its offer with ICT, IoT and Cloud services. It is a leader in film distribution and exhibition, holding the largest number of movie theaters and cinema complexes in Portugal.

At the forefront of 5G technology implementation, NOS leads in innovation associated with smart cities and the development of 5.0 societies. Committed to aligning its emissions with the decarbonization trajectories necessary to limit global warming, NOS has signed the United Nations’ ‘Business Ambition for 1.5ºC’ Commitment Letter.

Challenge

NOS Comunicações was looking to modernize the delivery of one of the most critical applications to its business. This modernization would have demanding parameters in terms of availability (greater than 99.99%), security and privacy, acquisition cost and, in particular, management cost.

As an operator of critical telecommunication infrastructure, NOS emphasizes the balance between availability and management costs, given the technical and human complexities of operating critical solutions.

Solution

NOS moved forward with an Application and Workspace Virtualization Platform, based on the Enterprise Open Workspace (EOW) product. In the project’s first phase, the critical application was virtualized on EOW using Application Bubble technologies for portability and security. In the second phase, Application Streaming technology was introduced, ensuring agile access irrespective of the user’s equipment and location. To guarantee High Availability and Disaster Recovery, EOW was deployed across multiple locations, including Lisbon and Porto.

The environment included a Geographic Balancer (DSM) and took advantage of the product’s Architectural Modularity, which doesn’t require any additional licensing for High Availability/Disaster Recovery features and additional locations. Despite the fully distributed and replicated architecture, NOS also benefited from the EOW architecture based on Lean Components in order to reduce computational requirements and minimize costs.

Key Metrics

0

High Availability Components

25

Computational Resources Vs VDI

5

Management Cost vs Acquisition

Benefits

  • Modernization of the critical application with independence from the Operating System.
  • Availability of the critical application anywhere, on any device, including through 5G.
  • Distributed architecture with two locations (Lisbon and Porto), without single points of failure, featuring two redundant geographic load balancers (DSM) and two highly available virtualization environments, Active-Active.
  • No additional costs or fees for High Availability/Disaster Recovery components or functionalities, even including redundant geographical balancers.
  • Guaranteed availability during platform updates, leveraging the distributed architecture.
  • Compared to rival VDI solutions, EOW uses just 25% of the computational resources.

The stability that EOW brought to our application architecture and day-to-day operations allows us to deliver a highly reliable solution to our users.

Pedro MatosDigital Workplace Manager at NOS

The EOW solution is an essential component of our technological architecture as it enables the virtualization of critical applications for NOS's business, which are fundamental for providing services in our call centers.

Pedro MatosDigital Workplace Manager at NOS

In the last three years, we have had availability levels above 99.99%. It is indeed a solution that doesn't give us any problems, it is a good example of a platform that we forget exists.

Pedro MatosDigital Workplace Manager at NOS

The stability that EOW brought to our application architecture and day-to-day operations allows us to deliver a highly reliable solution to our users.

Pedro MatosDigital Workplace Manager at NOS

In this project, the participation of the manufacturer was crucial as they demonstrated the advantage of being able to adapt EOW to the customer's infrastructure.

António BentoSales Manager at Hopla! Software

The EOW solution is an essential component of our technological architecture as it enables the virtualization of critical applications for NOS's business, which are fundamental for providing services in our call centers.

Pedro MatosDigital Workplace Manager at NOS

It has a highly integrated licensing method where we can encompass everything the platform needs in terms of availability, number of users, in a comprehensive way across the organization, and with a more or less fixed cost, ensuring cost predictability of the platform for the end customer."

António BentoSales Manager at Hopla! Software

In the last three years, we have had availability levels above 99.99%. It is indeed a solution that doesn't give us any problems, it is a good example of a platform that we forget exists.

Pedro MatosDigital Workplace Manager at NOS
99.99%
availability

53 minutes

Maximum annual unavailability

In 3 years of operation, it has never been exceeded, even with management and maintenance tasks.

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