Vodacom’s One Year Recovery

Vodacom (Pty) Ltd is one of the largest cellular telephone service providers in Africa, currently supplying voice and messaging services to over 55 million customers. Prepaid calling cards are a major Vodacom service, which if unavailable, would cause much of Africa’s cellular traffic to come to a halt as subscribers exhaust their cellular minutes. Therefore, Vodacom uses HP NonStop server pairs to provide prepaid calling card services via its prepaid front end (PPFE). To minimize PPFE outages, the HP NonStop server pairs implement the Shadowbase bi-directional sizzling-hot-takeover (SZT) data replication architecture to ensure multi-second recovery times. An explosion in August, 2013, nearly destroyed one of Vodacom’s Tanzanian PPFE systems, and it took nearly a year to rebuild the damaged system using new hardware. This case study provides insight into architecting advanced business continuity architectures, and the lessons learned when even a large amount of extensive preparation is tested by a challenging environment and series of catastrophic events. Read this article to consider these lessons and to apply them to your IT sysems before disaster strikes.

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Vodacom’s One Year Recovery