Array's makes mobility better

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 Array Networks for multiple transaction interfaces. The business model works on complete prepaid structure across the chain and all transactions are online. 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 transaction 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 transaction performance into the market place. Thus it became essential 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 processing, 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,”" certified 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 technology 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.”