Thailand's largest mobile operator Advanced Info Service (AIS) has built a computing cluster as the delivery platform for its mobile services.
Comprising 200 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, the Value-added Service Control Point (VSCP) system provides AIS with the capability to quickly launch new mobile services, as well as manage service quality and billing, according to a statement last week.
AIS said it saved "millions of dollars" with the new system, "drastically" reducing both hardware and software costs, and enjoyed "great flexibility" in tweaking its own solution and avoiding vendor lock-in.
In Thailand, the prepaid service market serves the vast majority of cellphone users. However, it has challenged operators such as AIS, which have had to integrate next-generation technologies with legacy systems that are expensive to implement and lacking in usage-tracking services.
AIS said upgrading its existing systems to serve the growing prepaid market would cost "tens of millions of dollars", resulting in its decision to develop its own system.
Arakin Rakchittapoke, the operator's executive of infrastructure platform development, said: "AIS is currently the biggest mobile phone operator in Thailand, so the availability preference for us is 99.999 percent uptime.
"For every minute of downtime, there is potential for 60,000 [customer] complaints and we can't have that," Arakin said. "We need a cost-effective solution that will be resilient and reliable as our demand in the telecommunications industry and the prepaid market, continue to grow."
Although cluster computing is widely known to be a Linux stronghold, software giant Microsoft has also been making some headway in that market. Analyst company Gartner noted recently that Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server is doing better than expected, winning over customers with small-cluster implementations that integrate with Windows desktop PCs.
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