Sun Solaris 10

Sun Solaris 10 is the leading enterprise class operating system today. It is available for SPARC and X64 servers and has been proven as the most reliable and scalable OS available.

At PMT we use Solaris 10 as our primary production environment for all our software. It provides a number of features that is very important for reliable, carrier grade services. We use many of the built-in functionality such as the Service Management Facility, ZFS, Zones, multipathing and predictive self-healing.

PMT is a Sun Independent Software Vendor (ISV).

Sun Hardware

In a telecommunications system you cannot afford to use unreliable hardware. At PMT we use Sun Microsystems equipment exclusively for our solutions. It gives us affordable hardware, a robust operating system and the best file system ever – ZFS.

The smallest systems use the Sun Fire 4100 series servers while the larger system use the Sun Blade 6000 series of blade servers.

Monitoring

All PMT products are monitored through Sun Management Server 4.0 & SNMP.

The Management Centre provides for full monitoring of all critical aspects of the running system including routers, firewalls, communications infrastructure, disk utilisation and other alarms. It constantly checks the parameters of the running system and raises alarms as soon as any abnormalities are detected.

SNMP makes it possible to read the current values of many different performance counters and to integrate with other monitoring systems through a standard interface.

Scalable Architecture

Scalability is a fundamental principle applied in the architecture of our systems. It is very visible in systems such as Emerald Voucher.

The Voucher Store is distributed between up to 16 physical blades, with any particular voucher present on at least 4 blades. The building blocks for scalability - a realtime database, the fault tolerant design and the special cluster architecture - is present everywhere in our systems.

We have an architecture that scales from one machine to over 20 machines. Scalability from one core to over eighty cores. Clustering is part of the package by default - not something that you have to pay for separately.

Realtime Database

Many systems need to be non-stop and available 24/7. They require a very high level of fault tolerance. Traditional SQL databases don't always match these requirements. They are often very expensive and complex to operate.

Our products are built on top of a powerful realtime database that supports replication and distributed transactions out of the box. The database makes it possible for a system to run on many machines at the same time. If one machine fails, the data will always be intact.

The database keeps multiple copies of the data on each machine and makes sure that all changes are always atomically applied on all nodes.