Provide a brief description of the Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative?
This submission pertains to Compugen‘s Infrastructure Optimization solution that not only helped Kore Telematics dramatically simplify IT operations and reduce cost internally in its data centre, but also helped them improve the performance and reliability of their external network to customers, allowing the firm to solidify customer confidence and win new business. Kore Telematics Inc. (www.koretelematics.com) is the world’s largest specialized provider of business-class, all-digital wireless services for the M2M (machine-to-machine) telematics and telemetry markets. Its customers represent applications in virtually every industry, including vehicle tracking, medical alarming, utility metering, debit/credit card payment processing, landfill monitoring, offender tracking, banking/ATM and more. Kore offices in Toronto (head office), Atlanta (sales) and Winnipeg (technical operations) serve 600 customers throughout North America. This comprehensive solution, which consisted of the following two major initiatives, in effect revamped a major portion of Kore’s overall IT infrastructure, producing substantial benefits for the company and its customers. New IP WAN for Customer Data Delivery The Kore service delivery model is critically dependent on two sets of networks – third-party cellular networks managed by the major telecom carriers over which telemetry data originating from hundreds of thousands of wirelessly connected customer devices is sent to Kore, and a wide-area IP network Kore owns and operates out of the firm’s Winnipeg facility, over which the data is then transported to customers. For wide-area network (IP WAN) connections to its customers, Kore was previously using secure VPN connections over the Internet; however, this approach was suboptimal for guaranteeing long-term service delivery and scalability. This first-generation Kore network had also evolved based on a variety of disparate network technologies as the business grew and thus was not considered sufficiently robust to provide failover capabilities and there were some network latency issues. This was of particular concern for customers with mission-critical, real-time applications, such as retail operators trying to process debit or credit cards, or hospital staff with patients on heart monitors. Kore’s growing size and changing business requirements had clearly outgrown the capabilities of their existing network; so Compugen, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, helped KORE build a completely new IP WAN infrastructure from the ground up based on Cisco technology. Since KORE also decided to move network operations to a different city, the project required Compugen to build the new IP WAN infrastructure in that new city. In addition, a duplicate network infrastructure was also built in yet another city as a secondary, backup site for redundancy and failover. Data centre Infrastructure Rebuild “Our experience with Compugen in building a new customer network was so successful that we engaged their services further to help us to rebuild our back-end data centre infrastructure,” says Thomas. Kore’s data centre is dominated by its server infrastructure, which supports both internal administrative applications as well as external, customer-facing applications. Server roles include M2M application servers, Web and customer portal servers, billing servers, Microsoft Exchange Servers, Blackberry Enterprise Servers, development and test servers, and more – 39 in total. Like their network, Kore’s server environment had grown in bits and pieces as the company grew and additional applications and business processes were added – a classic case of ‘server sprawl’. The result was that Kore had too many servers to manage for a company of its size, the server hardware was old and running out of capacity, which was causing processing problems, their carbon footprint was unnecessarily large, and they had inadequate backup in the event of server failure. To resolve these challenges, Compugen rebuilt Kore’s datacentre based on Cisco’s new Unified Computing System server platform, an EMC SAN and VMware virtualization software, which Compugen used to consolidate 35 production servers into virtual machines running on just four physical servers. As with its network operations, Kore decided to move its data centre to another city, so Compugen built and tested the new infrastructure in parallel with the existing infrastructure and then moved it to the new city location. As a continuation of this effort, a duplicate of this new data centre infrastructure will also be built in yet another city as a secondary, backup site for redundancy and failover.
Describe what makes this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative original or innovative.How is this over and above the accepted norm?
Kore is one of the few M2M providers that offer geographical redundancy for customers with respect to network connectivity. Typically, M2M providers will take down systems or equipment for maintenance purposes. While these maintenance windows are scheduled and notices are sent to customers advising of the outage, at the end of the day a customer’s traffic ceases to flow during the outage. With geographic redundancy and industry standard routing protocols in place, Kore now has the ability to perform maintenance on systems without affecting customer connections. This innovation provides customers with a high degree of confidence in Kore’s business and permits their information to flow on a 24 x 7 basis, with no interruption in service. In addition to being one of very few machine-to-machine firms that can offer customers a complete, high-availability, fully geo-redundant, failsafe network, Kore, with Compugen’s help, may have been one of few who have convinced the major telecom carriers to re-architect how they connect to partners such as Kore. The telcos are often accused of having a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to doing business, whereby their customers must conform to the telco’s chosen connection protocol(s), which may only leave one or two choices. In the case of this project, however, Kore and Compugen worked closely and cooperatively with a number of major carriers to have them support the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a more resilient and scalable routing protocol that is also better for customers because it is faster and fails over much more quickly than VPN. As an extension of this type of innovative thinking, the Kore-Compugen team architected Kore’s new IP WAN to give customers multiple choices in how they connect to KORE to get their data, including through Kore’s dynamic multi-point VPN service, a straight IPSec VPN service or an encrypted BGP connection, for example. “The benefit to the customer is that they don’t have to conform to some preset connection standard, and because of the flexibility that our new network offers, we have yet to find a way in which we can’t connect a customer based on the customer’s own requirements,” exclaims Morris. On the data centre side, the choice of the new Cisco Unified Computing Solution as the new server platform for Kore may be considered innovative, especially with traditional server brands such as HP, IBM, Dell and others so well entrenched in the marketplace and thus such an easy default choice for any firm. The Kore project is in fact one of the first few production installations of Cisco UCS in Canada. While arguably innovative, the combination of the Cisco UCS server platform, EMC SAN and VMware virtualization has created a highly available and highly scalable computing environment for Kore’s application processing environment. Server and storage maintenance, for example, can be done without impacting system performance or disrupting users by using dynamic workload allocation capabilities offered by the VMware software. “Our databases are zero downtime fault-tolerant, so I can walk into the data ce