• About TDM Group
• Delivering results through
  strong alliances
• Growing with our clients
  • Success story – Aspiren
  • Success story – m35
  • Success story – Symbian
• Other case studies
• Contact TDM Group to find out
  how your business can benefit

About TDM Group

 

Success stories – Symbian

Symbian is a software licensing company, owned by wireless industry leaders, that is the trusted supplier of the advanced, open, standard operating system - Symbian OS - for data-enabled mobile phones.

The company has close to two decades of experience developing software technology for mobile computing devices and mobile phones and it’s role as a driving force for the wireless industry is internationally recognized. This is reflected by key partnerships with leading-edge technology companies worldwide.

Symbian was established as a private independent company in June 1998 and is owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Panasonic, Motorola, Psion, Samsung Electronics, Siemens and Sony Ericsson. Headquartered in the UK, it has offices in Japan, Sweden, UK and the USA.

The Brief

Symbian needed to source a co-location server hosting solution, which provided a reliable, scalable, secure and flexible environment for the hosting of internet and most extranet services. Vast volumes of data-sensitive information is exchanged, downloaded and tested on their portal site, so it was essential to find a solution where there was no compromise on speed of service and, even more importantly, security. The service provided needed to be reliable, fully scalable and with no bandwidth or downtime issues.

The Solution

Security was identified as the number one priority due to the data-sensitive nature of Symbian’s group of sites. In order to ensure safety of their sites, TDM provided Symbian with a complete solution in a dedicated rack and a separate virtual network (VLAN), creating a secure and flexible environment. This separated Symbian infrastructure from that of any other company hosted at the site, thus allowing convenient physical and electronic access to the site as and when required.

The day to day management and performance of the servers was available through TDM’s Network Control Centre (NCC) which provides Symbian and all it's customers with round the clock management facilities. Using some of the services provided by the TDM NCC, Symbian can monitor such things as activity taking place on hosts and traffic activity at the sites.

The second priority was redundancy. These sites are essential to the communication activities of Symbian and the unreliability of the service, prior to hosting with TDM, had impacted Symbian. In order to address this, TDM and Symbian created an environment utilising redundant infrastructure in a cost effective manner.

Finally, the third issue was scalability. Traffic to and from Symbian's site was recognised as being prone to very large (and frequent) spikes and this called for a very flexible and scalable solution. This combined with the fact that Symbian is a growing company, with increasing business activity and press coverage meant that the design had to handle rapidly increasing demands and changes to it's environment.

Conclusion

TDM has worked very closely with Symbian to ensure all issues are addressed. According to David Gwin, Head of Information Systems at Symbian, "Since moving external hosting activities to TDM, web hosting has simply become something we do and not something we have to worry about. Reliability and manageability has increased far beyond our original expectations. Outages very rarely occur and when they do occur, they are dealt with in a speedy and professional manner. What is the most surprising is that these improvements were achieved without increasing expenditure. More than two years have passed since moving to TDM and expenditure has only recently passed pre-TDM levels and that is as a result of the increase in sites and servers being hosted with TDM."