EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, in partnership with Redstor, today announced that United Kingdom-based HTK, a leader in providing next generation services for telecoms providers, has deployed EMC® Celerra® NS40 to underpin its core business hosted managed services offerings to telecoms customers.  EMC’s IP storage system has enabled HTK to consolidate infrastructure and provide faster access to audio and video content, providing operator end user customers with fast, reliable access to services.

HTK provides Sulake, owners of the Habbo Hotel social networking site for teenagers, with an international IVR payment solution that enables Habbo users to buy credits for the online Habbo Hotel.

Transaction volumes are increasing month on month and incumbent systems weren’t scalable enough to cope with the new levels of information.  HTK needed to upgrade its system to enable it to continue servicing operators who rely on HTK’s automated, IVR (interactive voice response) services to provide customers with access to personalised information services.

The EMC Celerra NS40 provides five terabytes of Network Attached Storage (NAS) space, providing scaleable capacity for storing video and audio content. Secondly, it underpins HTK’s Storage Area Network (SAN), consolidating storage for applications and database services. EMC Celerra has enabled HTK to support core automated voice services for 02, the Habbo Hotel social networking website and a number of public sector services including PNN3 messaging services for the UK Police.

Justin Bowser, Operations Director HTK said: “HTK technology provides operators and companies with the flexibility and framework to quickly deploy automated voice and messaging services without having to heavily invest in setting up an infrastructure.  This is very important in a competitive market when developing a system like this from scratch may take over 12 months, whereas we can have a service up and running on our service delivery platform in a matter of weeks.”

Justin Bowser continued: ‘Given the age of the users of the Habbo site, Sulake felt it their responsibility to make sure users were not over spending. As a result they asked HTK to put in place an IVR solution that limits users to a pre determined number of credits.  By identifying users through their CLI (Caller Line Identification), HTK protects users by making sure they cannot access the IVR service if they have reached their pre-set daily, weekly or monthly spending limits.

EMC Celerra provides HTK with storage to keep records of customer interactions with HTK’s hosted managed services.  These records are used to maintain customer profiles, enabling operators to provide a wholly personalised service for end users.

Deployment of the EMC Celerra has provided HTK with a robust, highly available and cost effective storage system.  Justin Bowser continued, “As a result of the altered business model our team is able to focus on innovation instead of looking after disparate IT kit, and pass the benefits of this innovation onto our customers.  We have already begun work on more customer centric solutions that leverage our improved data access performance as a result of the EMC, Redstor implementation.”

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