Traffic growth forces Xtra to lift capacity

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

A lack of capacity has forced New Zealand's largest internet service provider, Xtra, to upgrade its e-mail infrastructure.

Telecom spokesman Shane Ohlin said that the new platform went live on October 14, two weeks ahead of schedule.

Xtra's previous e-mail system had struggled to keep up with increased traffic levels, he said.

"From a capacity point of view we have been under pressure."

He said Xtra was now handling colossal levels of e-mail traffic.

Telecom's annual report said Xtra had 390,000 users at the end of June, compared with 287,000 a year earlier, an increase of 39 per cent.

Xtra was handling 160 gigabytes of e-mail a day, up from a daily average of 78 gigabytes last year.

Its old system, based on SGI equipment, had been replaced with a system based entirely on Sun servers, with storage area network (SAN) equipment from EMC and a StorageTek tape library.

This had raised Xtra's capacity from 430,000 e-mail mailboxes to 600,000.

"One of the key differences with the new system is that we will be able to add capacity with zero impact on the services."

The new e-mail system had cost around $7 million so far, including implementation, but further changes would take its total cost past $10 million.

But the changes came too late for Hamilton-based Xtra user Bill Rout, who has switched to ihug.

He had complained twice to Xtra about poor service in the past month, with one problem relating to an aborted attempt to download 8 megabytes of e-mails using his Xtra account on October 13.

"It took four hours and in the end I had to give up," Mr Rout said.

"I downloaded the final 4 megabyte file using my Zfree account from the Xtramail web page - that only took me 10 minutes."

He said that this experience had shown that neither his phone line nor his computer was at fault, contrary to the suggested solutions offered by Xtra helpdesk staff.

Because of this he had invoiced the ISP $360 for four hours of his wasted time.

But Xtra had refused to pay, saying that his problems were "an unavoidable factor of the server upgrade".

The helpdesk said it was "reluctant to blame things on the network because that left the customer at the mercy of the technicians working on the Xtra servers, when it was possible that changes on the customer's computer might result in better service.

Mr Ohlin said there had been few issues during the upgrade.

Xtra had suffered from some problems with outsourced IP network capacity from Telecom and there had been some outages affecting connections to the ADSL network.

He denied that Xtra staff were reluctant to post details of network problems on its help page.

"We have a process which allows the helpdesk to update the website as soon as they became aware of problems. We can also do this through our network management systems.

"With business customers especially, we are looking to reach out and inform them of known problems, especially planned outages.

"If this is not happening then we are not happy either. We are very sympathetic to our customers on this."