Unitel supports 13 million mobile customers in Angola with Kemp solutions

The Challenge

Unitel required a load balancing solution to replace their aging Cisco ACE load balancers that were reaching end of life. As Cisco ended their support for the ACE load balancing product, it was critical for Unitel to find a solution that met the high standards required for a mobile telephone company. Unitel had a project that had to meet specific technical requirements and needed to be completed in a specific timeframe to maintain their confidence in the network infrastructure.

The Kemp Solution

Unitel came to Kemp with a list of criteria that had to be met to meet their standards to replace the Cisco ACE hardware.

• The migration from Cisco ACE to the new system must be smooth.
• The learning curve, in term of configuration and syntax, must not be high.
• The new system should have some kind of geographic redundancy.
• It must be a cost effective solution.

Kemp proposed a solution to put 6 LM-X15 load balancers in each of two datacenters. The architecture is designed to support the external third-party partners such as various banks and private businesses as well as the internal clients within the Unitel organization.

This solution provides the high availability necessary to support 24/7 services without a single point of failure. In addition, the solution allows Unitel to take advantage of the GEO feature to enable global server load balancing (GSLB) for geographic redundancy and location-based load balancing.

Kemp provided a smooth migration from the Cisco ACE configuration to the Kemp solution during the implementation process. During this engagement and on subsequent occasions, Unitel has been extremely pleased with Kemp’s response time, friendly engagement, and level of support.

The End Result

Unitel has been able to migrate from a legacy product that is no longer supported to Kemp with a modern, easy to use, and cost effective solution that meets and exceeds all of their technical and operational needs. As a mobile service provider, the availability and responsiveness of their SIRE application is critical for their business and customers.