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
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25
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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.
53 minutes
Maximum annual unavailability
In 3 years of operation, it has never been exceeded, even with management and maintenance tasks.
