spusu: High-availability telecommunications network

Published on 20. January 2023
Spusu Success Story PATCHBOX

spusu is an international mobile communications provider from Austria with over 500,000 customers. The company scores with fair prices and excellent customer satisfaction and has already received three quality seals in 2022 alone. To improve stability and reliability in IT, spusu has been relying on PATCHBOX since 2020.

Facts about the company

2015

Founded

+500.000

Customers

8

Locations

spusu has several data centers in Vienna (two locations), Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Milan, Rome and London (two locations). Triggered by strong customer growth, spusu technicians work day and night to expand network capacity, which also means almost daily work in the countless network racks.

“After the initial installation, a network rack is always organized. But due to continuous moved, adds and changes, it can quickly become confusing in a rack,” says Florian Parnigoni, COO at spusu.

Due to the many changes in the racks, the company was looking for a more effective solution. During the search, Mr. Parnigoni came across PATCHBOX.

Florian Parnigoni was immediately convinced, wanted to find out more and booked a webinar with us, in which further features and advantages of our cable management system were explained to him.

A short time later followed the first delivery and the quick and easy installation of the PATCHBOX with Cat.6a cables in spusu’s network racks.

Besides the aesthetics, the more effective maintenance and the huge reduction of downtimes was the main reason for the acquisition. Installation, maintenance and troubleshooting are up to eight times faster with the PATCHBOX.

“We have managed the problem of tangled cables very well with the PATCHBOX. We now have outage-preventing cabling, which provides a stability boost in our data centers.”

But space savings are also a big advantage of PATCHBOX. With our innovative cable management system, up to 50% more space can be used in the network cabinet.

spusu network rack PATCHBOX
The PATCHBOX in use at spusu.

Since the PATCHBOX Patchcatch replaces patch panels and other cable managers that normally take up one rack unit each. spusu can use almost every single of its 52RU in the network racks for hardware. Depending on the setup, PATCHBOX replaces several rack units of cable managers.

With conventional cabling, 1-2 rack units per switch or patch panel would have to be sacrificed for cable managers, requiring additional network racks along with high costs for further square meters in the data center. Expenses that were saved by using PATCHBOX.

Wasting rack units would be far too expensive. Data centers charge per square meter, so we have to use every rack unit,” says Florian Parnigoni. spusu uses Long Range Cassettes with a cable length of up to 2.5 meters to work vertically instead horizontally.

Several times a week spusu has to carry out moves, adds and changes in the racks. Whereas in the past, in extreme cases, this could even mean that the entire cabling had to be unplugged and the rack completely rebuilt, spusu now uses the retractable cables of the PATCHBOX and makes the work much easier.

With the modular system of the PATCHBOX, the different cable colors are also used to clearly assign the areas of use. This improved overview is especially helpful in emergencies. PATCHBOX is available in eight cable colors and offers a high degree of customization.

We cannot afford any downtimes,” said Florian Parnigoni, who emphasized how important stability and reliability are for spusu. According to a study by Gartner, one minute of downtime costs $5,600 – and the PATCHBOX helps to keep these downtimes and the resulting costs low.

The parent company Mass Response Service GmbH is also responsible for handling major televoting events such as the Eurovision Song Contest. While more than 160 million viewers sit in front of their TVs and vote for their favorite candidates, there must be no downtime.

To guarantee this, spusu relies not only on redundancy, but also on the PATCHBOX to avoid outages and to enable technicians to react more quickly in emergencies, should they nevertheless occur.

The Eurovision Song Contest is just one of many interesting projects. spusu is a fast growing company, active in more and more countries and has to expand its data centers constantly.

PATCHBOX is an indispensable product in this regard, always standing by the side of the Austrian mobile provider even during its fortunately “enormous growth” and still helping to keep the racks clean and tidy today.

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