Vodacom’s One Year Recovery

Voice and Messaging Services

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.

Prepaid Calling Card Services

Therefore, Vodacom uses HPE NonStop Server pairs to provide prepaid calling card services via its prepaid front end (PPFE).

HPE Shadowbase Bi-directional Sizzling-Hot-Takeover (SZT) Data Replication

To minimize PPFE outages, the HPE NonStop Server pairs implement the HPE Shadowbase bi-directional sizzling-hot-takeover data replication architecture to ensure multi-second recovery times.

An Explosion Occurred

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.

Lessons Learned

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 case study to consider these lessons and apply them to your IT systems before disaster strikes.

Case Study:
Vodacoms One Year Recovery