Mirantis > Case Studies > With OpenStack, Telstra reduces provisioning time from weeks to seconds

With OpenStack, Telstra reduces provisioning time from weeks to seconds

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America
Asia
Pacific

Country

Australia
China
Hong Kong
Japan
Singapore
United States

Product

Mirantis OpenStack
PEN API
Programmable network controller from Sonus

Tech Stack

OpenStack
SDN
API

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Networks & Connectivity - Software-Defined Networking

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Telstra is a leading telecommunications and technology company with headquarters in Australia. The company operates in 23 countries, including Australia, with 36,000 employees globally. Telstra’s solutions range from global connectivity, managed network services, cloud services, collaboration services, voice and mobile services and satellite and media services. The Global Enterprise and Services division of Telstra provides IP networks and network applications services. In 2015, Telstra acquired Pacnet Limited that doubled their customer base in Asia and gave them access to the PEN product offering.

The Challenge

Telstra, a leading telecommunications and technology company, was facing challenges in dynamically allocating bandwidth to efficiently provide the exact network resources required by every user at any given time. This was critical to minimize latency in applications with large volumes of fast-moving data and to maintain high end-to-end performance in bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video, gaming and other multimedia. The rapid growth of cloud computing was putting tremendous pressure on the company to ensure reliable, high-performance networking services despite heavier traffic patterns and greater strain on network bandwidth for distributed computing operations. The company's PEN group had historically built out infrastructure that made provisioning a circuit for customers a multiweek process that included manually setting up switches, routers and other equipment. Customers were becoming more savvy and demanded more speed — in tasks ranging from provisioning circuits to allocating bandwidth.

The Solution

Telstra selected Mirantis OpenStack, along with integration services from Mirantis, to provide a flexible bandwidth solution utilizing SDN across multiple geographically distributed data centers to provide point-to-point connectivity between OpenStack clouds. Customers work from the PEN API, a self-service customer portal and PEN UI, the network control plane powered by Mirantis OpenStack using Fuel, to dynamically provision network connectivity and bandwidth by calling the API with automation tools. Telstra’s SDN platform, known as PEN, is the first pan-Asian Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) architecture available to carriers and enterprises. With PEN, port-to-port connections can be provisioned in about four seconds, even between geographically distant data centers in different countries and continents. Carriers and enterprises can easily create a network of clouds throughout the Asia-Pacific region and the United States.

Operational Impact