Leading Telecom Accelerates Development with Containers and Dynamic Storage

In a highly competitive market, one telecom embraces the cloud to scale quickly and deliver features that keep it ahead of the competition.

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As we’ve learned over the past couple of years, always-on connectivity is no longer a nice-to-have. Fast, reliable, and secure telecommunication services are central to the way we work, learn, and entertain. That means subscriber expectations are higher than ever. And in an industry notorious for churn, there is no shortage of choice. 

To stay ahead of the competition, telecommunications companies are constantly adding to their portfolio of fiber, cable, wireless, and satellite offerings. Innovation and speed to market are what set them apart. For one leading telecom company, that meant embracing the cloud to deliver services that wow subscribers and keep them loyal to their brand. 

Using Portworx® Enterprise on Pure Storage® FlashArray™, the company transformed its environment with Kubernetes-managed containerized platforms, gaining high-performance storage plus data services that turn the Kubernetes environment into a self-service development platform. Now, developers can get apps in front of subscribers faster, and web teams can scale to meet the highest demands. 

The result? Better service, innovative offerings, and higher customer lifetime value. 

Dialing In Development Delays 

For this telecom, digital transformation has become the backbone of the subscriber experience. But developers were spending a lot of time waiting for the infrastructure team to set up new development or production environments. This slowed time to market for new apps and features that provide subscribers with value-added services—such as online parental controls—or widgets to help customer support teams quickly resolve trouble tickets.  

The telecom turned to Portworx. Its automation capabilities enable the telecom to build new environments in less than a day. Features such as monitoring, load-balancing, and backups are automatically built into each new environment, eliminating the traditional multi-step process to build out virtual machines. Snapshots on both the application and cloud level reduce restore times and keep applications running without interruption.

The speedy deployment and reliable performance mean fewer delays in the development cycle. Now, the telecom can develop new applications faster and push updates into production orders of magnitude faster—from six months to as little as a few hours. As a result, developers can focus on continuous innovation to take the subscriber experience to the next level—and keep the competition at bay.   

No Customer Demand Is Too High 

This level of agility means the telecom can handily meet market demands. Take the release of a new smartphone. Early adopters will watch their provider’s website all day, eagerly refreshing the web page at midnight in the hopes of being among the first to buy. Naturally, this creates huge surges in web traffic. If the website is slow—or the servers overload—customers will rush to purchase from a competitor instead. 

Now, Portworx aggregates all storage into a container-native storage layer, creating a dynamic environment where the company can scale up or down as needed. Autoscaling capabilities measure demand and automatically create, expand, or delete new volumes within minutes. Many platform teams also choose to scale up capacity proactively before the midnight rush hits. With Portworx, they can add three to four times the capacity in seconds and keep applications running, no matter how high the demand.

Supporting an Evolving Cloud Landscape

The telecom’s lean IT team now oversees more than 10,000 VMs across three data centers. The environment also includes two different types of Kubernetes distributions, and Portworx provides consistency across those platforms. 

Portworx will continue to step up with high-performance, flexible storage as the telecom progresses in its cloud transformation journey, underpinning an unrivaled subscriber experience that will deliver value for years to come. 

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