e-brands started as a white-label Internet access provider (dial-up). The company was later acquired by Vivendi Universal.

The Platform

Overview of the e-brands server room

9 x 49U racks plus a SAN bay in a private room, hosted at LDCOM.

Network

Internet Access

Cisco 3660 routers

e-Brands had its own AS (AS21128). BGP4 peering ran on 2 Cisco 3660 routers with LDCOM and PROXAD.

e-Brands also had interconnects with:

  • Worldcom
  • SFR
  • Orange
  • Bouygues Telecom
  • Vizzavi
  • Cegetel

Load Balancing

ArrowPoint CS800

All web services were load-balanced by two ArrowPoint units: a CS800 and a CS150 in failover.

Switching

Cisco Catalyst 4000

All VLANs ran across two Cisco Catalyst 4000 switches, interconnected by a gigabit trunk.

Web Services

Classic 3-tier full Java architecture.

Web Frontends

Apache servers on Sun X1

Apache on Sun X1 machines, load-balanced by the ArrowPoint.

Application Servers

Tomcat + JBoss on Sun T2000

Tomcat and JBoss on Sun T2000 and T1125.

Database

Oracle cluster Sun V880

Oracle cluster: 2 Sun V880 + 1 Sun V280R connected via fibre channel to a Sun/HDS 9010 bay.

CRM Platform

CRM platform

Data processing (normalization, phonetization, deduplication) ran on a Sun E4500 using DataStage. Results stored in Oracle. Processing handled by Epiphany software.

Billing Platform

Billing platform

Billing platform for 0800 numbers on behalf of Cegetel.

SMS Platform

SMS platform

SMS routing to the 3 national operators: Orange, SFR, and Bouygues.

Shared Services

Core Internet Services

Internet services on OpenBSD

Core services (public and private DNS, mail relay, FTP, monitoring, etc.) ran on rackable PCs under OpenBSD.

Backup

Backup on DLT library

Backups to a DLT tape library using Veritas NetBackup.