Overview
Touchpoint partnered with Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, to deliver a legacy server performance improvement for Telstra, resolving critical performance constraints within a hosted customer environment.
By diagnosing system limitations, upgrading processing power and memory, and coordinating an after‑hours deployment across multiple stakeholders, Touchpoint delivered a legacy server performance upgrade that nearly doubled system performance and significantly reduced workload runtimes by 50% - without the cost or risk of full system replacement.
Client Context
Telstra is Australia’s largest telecommunications service provider, delivering national communications infrastructure alongside a broad portfolio of managed IT and hosting services. As part of these services, Telstra hosts and supports critical customer hardware platforms that underpin broader enterprise networks.
Maintaining performance, availability, and reliability across hosted environments - particularly those running legacy infrastructure - is essential to meeting customer service expectations while managing risk and cost.
Challenge
A Telstra customer was operating a series of legacy Sun servers as part of a wider enterprise network. Due to their age, these servers were increasingly unable to deliver the performance required to support demanding workloads.
The degraded performance resulted in extended runtimes for intensive processing jobs, increased wait times for users, and reduced flexibility to schedule additional workloads. While the systems remained operational, their declining performance was becoming a bottleneck for the broader environment.
Replacing the servers entirely would have introduced significant cost, complexity, and risk. Telstra required an alternative approach that could stabilise and improve performance while extending the useful life of the existing infrastructure.
To resolve the issue, Telstra engaged Touchpoint to assess the environment and determine whether a targeted legacy server performance upgrade could deliver the required improvement without disruption.
Approach
Touchpoint adopted a structured, low‑risk approach to deliver a legacy server performance improvement for Telstra, ensuring performance gains could be achieved without disrupting critical hosted operations. The engagement began with a detailed diagnostic phase, where Touchpoint worked alongside Telstra to assess system configurations, identify performance bottlenecks, and determine the most effective upgrade path.
To minimise deployment risk, Touchpoint sourced and pre‑tested all upgrade components in a controlled environment using a custom‑built test rig. This ensured compatibility and performance improvements were validated prior to implementation.
The upgrade was then executed during an after‑hours maintenance window. Touchpoint engineers coordinated closely with overseas system administrators to safely power down each server, install the upgraded components, reboot the systems, and run post‑upgrade diagnostics before returning them to service.
This methodical and collaborative approach ensured a smooth upgrade process with no disruption to live operations.
Solution
Touchpoint delivered a complete upgrade solution designed to address the specific performance limitations identified during diagnostics.
The solution focused on increasing processing capability and expanding available memory across the affected Sun servers. Touchpoint sourced all required components, validated them through pre‑testing, and managed the end‑to‑end deployment process.
By combining hardware upgrades with structured deployment and validation, Touchpoint ensured that the solution delivered immediate and measurable performance improvements while maintaining system stability and integrity.
Impact
The legacy server performance upgrade delivered clear, measurable outcomes:
- Nearly double the performance across the upgraded Sun servers.
- Reduction of the most intensive workload runtimes by 50%.
- Significantly reduced wait times for users.
- Increased system availability for additional jobs.
- Cost‑effective extension of existing infrastructure life.
By improving performance without requiring full system replacement, Touchpoint delivered a highly efficient outcome for both Telstra and its customer. The result was a more responsive, stable environment and a very satisfied end user.