Swiss Telecom Sunrise Communications Opts for Violin Memory

Violin Memory, Inc. announced that Sunrise Communications AG (Sunrise), the largest privately-held telecommunications company in Switzerland, has chosen its 6000 Series flash memory array to accelerate the billing process for its nearly three million customers.

By deploying the Violin solution, Sunrise reduced processing time for its mission critical billing application by over 75%, streamlining operations and improving customer satisfaction. Sunrise was introduced to Violin Memory by IT solutions provider, and Violin partner, Lake Solutions AG, who guided the implementation.

Sunrise is the only private service telecommunications provider in Switzerland and offers a range of services to business and consumer customers including mobile, landline, internet and IPTV. Its billing system is a business-critical process with strict time constraints requiring bills to be issued within a 48-hour window. More stringent internal service level requirements set a 24 hour completion goal to allow for potential re-runs. By deploying Violin arrays, the company has seen processing time drop – a 76% improvement compared to the previous solution based on FC disk drives complemented by SSDs.

“Violin Flash Memory Arrays have proven to be a vast improvement compared to our previous system, which often forced us to bill in arrears,” said Detlef Steinmetz, CIO, Sunrise. “This is no longer the case as we now have a fast, reliable process. Our goal is to get the billing process down to less than one day and I’m confident that with Violin Memory we will be able to achieve this objective quickly and easily.“

Prior to switching to Violin, Sunrise struggled with a storage infrastructure that caused I/O starvation and made the billing process unpredictable and unacceptably long. These performance bottlenecks also meant backup and critical applications were halted during the bill run, which impacted multiple areas of the business. Like many companies, Sunrise had other mission critical requirements for its shared storage, and Violin did not disrupt the existing environment and provided reliability and no single point of failure.

“As a national telecommunications enterprise, Sunrise has demanding business requirements for its IT processes, and Violin Flash Memory Arrays have already shown that they can easily exceed them,” added Mick Bradley, MD, Violin Memory EMEA. “I am thrilled to witness how once again Violin technology has enabled an organisation to improve its performance, customer satisfaction, and its bottom line.“