A publicly listed telecom company requested NEC Hong Kong Limited for hardware/software support for their new telecom solution. mindVan was nominated to provide the service of Oracle database deployment and administration for the project.

Our Roles

• Collaborate with the networking team for the infrastructure setup of the database server
• Setup the Oracle Database under Solaris operating system in SPARC servers, configure Oracle Active/Standby architecture in High Availability with Data Guard (DG) failover, Recovery Manager (RMAN) backup and point-in-time disaster recovery at multiple sites
• Design the database schema and develop the stored procedures for the communication between the database server and the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) server for carrier (Juniper Networks - SBR Carrier)
• Cooperate with the database JDBC (Java database connectivity) API (application programming interface) developer for their scripts development
• Perform system security hardening with the in-house IT team
• Assist users for data migration, perform technical acceptance test (TAT), user acceptance test (UAT) and drill test
• Provide on-going support and maintenance

Project Scale

• It is a collaborative project that involves several parties such as networking infrastructure, user-interface application and database operation
• The data volume and transactions are huge. More than 1 million active users and routine transactions are managed in the database for daily operation
• The whole deployment stage is 10 months and mindVan is still providing the database management/maintenance services to the client at the moment

Challenges

• The platform provides services to part of the major telecommunication system in Hong Kong, serving millions of active users aily. More than a simple database management project, mindVan provides service to the client with business continuity planning (BCP), which comes with a full-scale failover handling and disaster recovery mechanism to ensure the system runs 24x7 round-the-clock with zero downtime fault tolerance. Also, drill tests of different scales have to be performed regularly to guarantee these measures are up-to-date and working properly with desired result.
• Since the data volume and transactions are extremely huge in the project, one of the challenges is to keep up with on-going expansion. For example, enlarging the physical storage space is one of measurements that mindVan has to deal with. It is a demanding task that mindVan has to ensure that there is no service interruption in a production system during the maintenance.

if you want to know more about setting up high-available and mission-critical database systems...