Ticketing Made Easy

Oxigen,
one
of the leaders in the electronic dispensation of prepaid mobile
phone recharge and payment settlement through 90,000 retailers across
India, recently partnered with href="http://www.ciol.com/Root/Android/Android-App/Array-Networks-intros-DesktopDirect-Android-app/152985/0/">Array
Networks for multiple
transaction interfaces. The business model works on complete prepaid
structure across the chain and all transactions are online. href="http://voicendata.ciol.com/content/news1/111080801.asp">Oxigen
is
one of the largest online transaction processing system handling more
than 20 mn transactions per month.

NEED FOR A DEPLOYMENT

The
business model works through multiple transaction interfaces for the
customer. These are transactions through POS terminal over TCPIP,
transactions through POS terminal over PSTN channel, website, SMS and
java-based mobile client application. For each type of transaction
channel, there are specific set of application servers to accept and
complete the ransaction request. As there are multiple transactions
happening simultaneously, as a result each application server was
over loaded to handle the requests. Thus it was becoming a bottleneck
in the business growth. There was a definite need of modification in
IT infrastructure design to support easy scalability and thus support
business growth. Under this situation, Oxigen analyzed the situation
and finalized that server load balancing technique is required in the
infrastructure to support the exponential growth in the business.

A NEW SOLUTION IS BORN

Oxigen
evaluated
various leading server load balancing solutions for
deployment in the infrastructure and finally chose Array primarily on
technological benefits, value for money, TOC, ease of deployment and
support structure. Array APV Load Balancer has been deplo yed in high
availability mode at both primary and DR data centers. All
transaction requests first hit the Load Balancer and then are sent to
the application server on the basis of IP address. There are multiple
such application servers installed for each set of application
depending on the requirements of the load.

PRE-DEPLOYMENT SCENARIO

“Before
implementing
load balancing tech nique, we were using different
server and IP addresses for each region but as the load started
increasing, handling so many servers and IP addresses became
cumbersome and difficult,” said Rahul Sharma, AVP, information
systems, Oxigen. “Increased load gradually started impacting the
tran saction performance into themarket place. Thus it became essen
tial to find out some robust and scalable solution to support
business growth. Every server failure resulted in business loss for
the complete region and obviously impacted on brand value,” Sharma
added.

CHALLENGES FACED

The
primary challenge before this deployment was difficulty in handling
the transaction load, besides, challenges in infrastructure
scalability, performance degradation in transaction proce ssing,
managing multiple servers and IP addresses.

A HELPING HAND

The
Array APV server Load Balancer has primarily helped in ease of
scalability of infrastructure for continuously increasing transaction
load. A single set of IP addresses is given in the market place for
each type of transaction request and multiple servers are deployed
behind this virtual IP address ensuring smooth transactions and easy
scalability as and when required depending on the transaction load.
There is an enormous ease in server maintenance and management
activities. There are no downtimes because of server failure, as the
Load Balancer transparently passes the request to the other available
server, in case of any server failure. “We initially deployed this
Load Balancer for single set of most critical and highest painful
application servers where it worked enormously well. After that we
gradually deployed the Load Balancer for almost all applications
where we felt that this will help,” Sharma added.

TESTIMONIAL

“We
are satisfied with the product and the service support provided by
the Array Networks. The solution has actually worked well for us and
we recommend this solution to anybody facing similar challenges in
managing transaction load and scalability issues,” certi fied
Sharma.

FUTURE MOVES

In
future, Oxigen is planning to move towards completely virtualized
server and private cloud computing space. In fact, according to
Sharma, the company has already started working in this direction and
completed the initial phase as per the plans for creating private
cloud.

ARRAY SPEAKS

“Being
a
prepaid mobile phone recharge, bill payment and ticketing services
provider, reliability, availability, security and a premium end-user
experience are critical factors for success,” said Shibu Paul,
national sales manager, India, Array Networks. “Array's techno
logy ensures Oxigen maintain secure and reliable service while
streamlining IT operations, which in turn, helps it to continue to be
one of the leaders in the industry.”