Established in 1961, COTAS is the largest telecommunications services provider in Bo-
livia. With headquarters in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the company started as a dedicated
provider of basic local and long-distance telephony. Today, the company has grown to
satellite television, wireless telephony, long distance and public telephony.
Challenge
COTAS was founded with a vision of providing the best telephony, internet and television service in
the Bolivian market. In order to deliver its growing base of subscribers with an outstanding customer
experience, COTAS realized it needed to upgrade and refresh its current system hardware to support
increased customer demand with headroom for the future. “Our customers are always demanding the
latest content—movies, videos, podcasts—as well as faster access to content over the internet and mo-
bile devices,” said German Galarza, Director of Engineering, COTAS. “We have over 120,000 customers
today and we anticipate the company doubling in size within the next few years. With that type of
growth, it’s absolutely critical for us to have the hardware infrastructure that meets the ever-increasing
requirements to support our customers.”
During the current data center refresh cycle, COTAS realized their existing hardware was starting to
show its limitations. “We were nearing capacity limits in our data center,” said Galarza. “Our data
center already consists of over 300 servers and we realized continuing with the current architecture
wasn’t going to be sustainable in the long run. It was clear we needed to fundamentally alter our
thinking and not just continue adding another server or two.”
Largest Bolivian Telecommunications
Company COTAS Delivers Services to over
120,000 Subscribers by Deploying Supermicro
Blade Servers in their Data Center
“In selecting Supermicro, we were getting the highest performance servers available on
the market and they could be easily configured to meet our specific requirements.”
–
German Galarza, Director of Engineering, COTAS
© Copyright 2020 Supermicro
COTAS initially started looking for solutions that could co-exist with their existing data center rather
than trying to make wholesale changes. Additionally, COTAS wanted equipment that could run at a
higher performance level and at the same time improve capacity and be more ecient.
“We had already made a large investment in our data center, so it was important to find a vendor that
could work with what we already have,” said Galarza “But at the same time, we were also looking to
get a higher level of performance since our existing hardware was already maxed out.”
Solution
COTAS evaluated a series of infrastructure vendors and took particular interest in Supermicro’s
high-performance blade servers, which oer a family of servers designed for the most demanding,
low-latency applications running on ORACLE that require the highest level of performance, scalability,
and reliability. COTAS settled on Supermicro’s SuperBlade—the industry’s highest performance server
with advanced networking capabilities. “It was really an easy choice in selecting Supermicro,” said
Galarza. “We were getting the highest performance servers available on the market and they could be
easily configured to meet our specific requirements.”
Another key consideration for COTAS in selecting Supermicro was Supermicro’s ability to perform
main-tenance and replication of its services live in its two data centers—the data center can continue
running while routine maintenance takes place—without re-installing applications. “Our data centers
continu-ously run 24x7. Because our databases support business-critical applications, it was imperative
to find a solution that didn’t require any shutdowns. SuperBlade can easily perform hot backups
ensuring our users always have access to their data and applications,” said Galarza.
Benefits
Since installing the Supermicro servers, COTAS has experienced numerous benefits in its data centers.
SuperBlade is designed for network security and ensures seamless interconnectivity across multiple
data centers. “We are spread out over several locations and we need smooth ethernet connections
among our data centers. Supermicro simplifies our network topology while increasing network resilien-
cy and scalability,” said Galarza.
SuperBlade systems provide the perfect foundation for a rack scale design data center solution. Super-
Blade is designed to meet the needs of users with unmatched flexibility in CPUs, memory and I/O. “We
really like having the option to select dierent components for each of our servers,” said Galarza. “This
flexibility has two advantages—we can configure each server to the unique requirements for each
application today; and we can scale for the future by replacing minor components rather than large,
costly infrastructure changes.”
COTAS found that Supermicro oered the most advantageous hardware solution, and has since been
a loyal customer .Given the challenge, COTAS came to one of Supermicro’s key system integrators,
within the Bolivian region along with Supermicro’s direct partner in Bolivia. Combining cutting-edge
and high-performance technologies from Supermicro , this provided the customer with the solution
they needed to replicate data, improve performance and not have any down time when working in
conjunction with other brand system hardware.
“We have been extremely pleased with the performance of Supermicro and look forward using addi-
tional Supermicro products as we continue to expand.”
© Copyright 2020 Supermicro
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