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Telewest Communications, the broadband communications and media group, currently provides multi-channel television and internet services to more than 1.7 million UK households, and voice and data telecommunications services to over 73,000 business customers.

Telewest is the leading provider of broadband communication solutions to the travel industry, operating the Fastrak 2000 viewdata service and the Endeavour travel extranet - Telewest's information technology tool for the travel market.

RWA designed and delivered a ViewData Session Manager for Telewest Business. The Session Manager sits at the heart of the Telewest Network and manages connections between 4000+ travel agents and over 100 tour operators. It is responsible for handling hundreds of thousands of sessions per day.

It is essential that this mission critical system is always available, and that billing information is both absolutely accurate and securely held.

RWA helped Telewest design an application architecture to meet the demanding performance, availability and fail-over requirements. The allowable unplanned outage period for the entire solution must be measured in seconds, not minutes. The solution employs both redundant loosely coupled Oracle nodes and redundant Session Managers together with Cisco Local Director technology to avoid any single point of failure (whether hardware or software). RWA and Telewest carried out extensive failure mode testing to validate the solution. The testing was automated using RWA simulators to simulate thousands of travel agent sessions.

Since the Session Managers are managed remotely from Telewest's travel division, based in Peterborough, Telewest needed a system that was simple to administer remotely. RWA delivered a web-based administration front end for use by Telewest staff. This was delivered using Java/JSP technology. Using this interface, staff are able to set up connections for new tour operator hosts, add ViewData mnemonics and customise the ViewData interface for individual agency chains.

Effective and up to date management reporting is essential to enable Telewest to view Session Manager activity and status. RWA delivered a suite of online reports that provide various breakdowns of current activity to each tour operator host, historical breakdowns of activity over the last 7 days, reports of failures (such as inability to make an onward connection to a host system), and of course billing reports.

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