Chungwa's Plan for Redundancy and Synchronization

With the Verimatrix revenue security solution in place, Chunghwa Telecom wanted to leverage the innovative technology to create a complete disaster recovery solution for its IPTV and over-the-top (OTT) networks.

With two geo-redundant data centers in Taipei servicing customers in the northern region, and two geo-redundant data centers in Tainan servicing customers in the southern region, and high-speed networking between them, achieving multiple layers of geographic redundancy was of critical importance.

To achieve this redundancy, a plan was devised to allow each regional data center to fail over to its respective backup regional data center, without any failover between the northern and southern regions. Each distinct user base would be managed independently, but with synchronization of all content ingestion occurring in the northern data centers, then being synchronized with southern data centers.

To ensure Chunghwa Telecom could achieve its disaster recovery goals with its Verimatrix solution, the Verimatrix Global Services team gained an in-depth understanding of Chunghwa Telecom’s goals and then devised a comprehensive plan to address them.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd.

Chunghwa Telecom Company, Ltd. is the largest telecommunications company in Taiwan and the incumbent local exchange carrier of PSTN, Mobile, and broadband services in the country.

The Verimatrix Global Services team first implemented a comprehensive high-availability Oracle redundancy architecture, which included both Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Oracle Data Guard. The team used four geographically separated RAC databases, with two RAC databases in the southern region and two RAC database instances in the northern region.

Within each region, Oracle Data Guard was implemented in addition to Oracle RAC clustered databases to achieve maximized data redundancy and failover. This provided Chunghwa Telecom with both capacity and redundancy within each data center, as well as disaster recovery between each of the regional units.

To achieve real-time key synchronization across all data centers for both IPTV and OTT services, the Verimatrix Global Services team deployed a combination of VCAS for IPTV Wholesale/Retail and a custom solution (to synchronize the OTT content and keys in real-time). Since OTT keys update at a more rapid rate than IPTV keys, this required a high availability solution to synchronize across large distances for both live and on-demand content, with minimal latency, and maximum levels of disaster recovery.