Sprint Project Named Among 100 Most Innovative Corporate IT Solutions for 2005

Sprint Ramps up for Data Deluge
Winner: Sprint
Project Description: The challenge of aggressively rolling out high-speed wireless service is dealing with all the operational data coming back upstream. By betting big on 3G nets, Sprint is adding an enormous load to its billing, network management, and fraud-detection infrastructure.

But instead of provisioning big iron to handle maximum network loads, Sprint is taking the opposite approach, deploying inexpensive, highly scalable "application fabrics" across a pool of x86 machines.

Using a software virtualization app developed by Appistry, Sprint can quickly and inexpensively add hardware as network-capacity needs increase. At press time, Sprint was in the process of moving a key part of its Broadband Data Gateway from midrange SMP servers to a dozen Xeon-based machines running Novell, Suse, Linux and Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF). Sprint’s in-house developers use Java to create tasks that implement the app’s functionality; the Appistry environment distributes tasks across the environment and manages communications between them. Sprint expects that the project, scheduled to be complete by the end 2005, will reduce the company’s annual hardware and maintenance costs significantly while it delivers improved service to the customer. The wireless giant also envisions migrating other mission-critical apps—such as provisioning, accounting, performance monitoring, and security—to the fabric.