CASE STUDY : RCom: Redefining Storage

Reliance Communications (RCom) one of India's largest integrated telecom
service providers, were seeking a storage solution for CDR storage. A CDR is
generated whenever a subscriber makes a phone call, and Indian telecom
regulations require CDR storage for at least seven years. As call volumes grew
at a pace of 1.5 million subscribers each month for the company, the storage
required to house CDRs escalated.

Since every call generates a significant amount of data for RCom's business
and operational support applications, data storage became a critical factor in
controlling IT costs, improving productivity, and handling call volume growth.

The challenge

A key business support system for any telecom company is its mediation
application, which converts raw CDRs generated by telecom switches into a format
accepted by “downstream” appli­ca­tions such as billing, inter-carrier
settlements, fraud control, and business intelli­gence systems. If a mediation
applica­tion is not able to process CDRs in real-time, it can negatively impact
the business. CDRs don't get “flushed” out of telecom switches on time, which
leads to telecom switches dropping more CDRs. This can lead to a revenue loss
for the carrier, as unrecorded CDRs cannot be converted to a call charge.
Downstream applica­tions also become sluggish, impacting billing, inter-carrier
settlements, and fraud detection/revenue assurance as well as revenue and
customer satisfaction.

RCom's previous SAN storage platforms supporting the mediation application,
Intec Mediation (IME), was limited in supporting only 500 million CDRs per day,
and this traffic led to slow CDR processing and a six to eight-hour backlog for
downstream applications. With the addition of 1.5 million subscribers per month,
it was getting difficult to carry on with the existing storage platform
supporting the Mediation application.

RCom can now support 1.6 billion CDRs a day, more than three times the previous throughput, without any additional investment in server resources Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance Communications

Another core telecom process that was experiencing capacity limitations was
the provisioning and CRM issue ticketing operation support systems (OSS). The
previous SAN architecture supporting the OSS applications, Clarity and Clarify
had the same sever performing both provisioning/trouble ticketing as well as the
business intelligence reporting, pushing CPU utilization near 100 percent. Dr
Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance Communications believed that creating additional
capacity to support the subscriber growth and an additional investment in
compute resources was “a business necessity.”

The solution

RCom took an innovative approach, employing NAS (NFS) for primary storage to
support core telecom business and operation systems as well as backup. Once RCom
decided on an NFS protocol, NetApp was bench­marked against compe­titors EMC and
HP.

“NetApp proved to be superior in performance and ease of management. After
rigorous live benchmarking, it was clear that NetApp was exactly what we
needed,” said Chowdhury.

A NetApp FAS3070 active-active cluster with over 110TB of capacity was
deployed. The clustered NetApp system now supports mission-critical
applica­tions including IME and FCRA as well as business intelligence reporting
for applications including Clarity provisioning and network alarm systems,
Clarify CRM, and the Uninter­rupted Customer Service (UCS) application. Moving
to NAS helped RCOM free up server resources to support business growth, instead
of supporting backup and other operations in the previous SAN environment.

The data on NetApp is directly backed up onto tape using NDMP so that the
backup process does not load the IME servers. The backup speed is sustained at
234GB per hour, eight times faster than the previous architecture. Snapshot
copies are now created on the NetApp storage system for quick restores compared
to the previous business continuous volumes (BCV) approach on the HP SAN system,
requiring only 20 percent of primary storage space.

Business benefits

With this deployment, RCom has saved over estimated $4.25 million with
NetApp, which includes $950,000 savings in annual storage spend, $1.5 million by
avoiding an upgrade to a more powerful server (and all the operational costs
associated with it), and $1.8 million in terms of the impact on customer
satisfaction index and brand value due to any customer response performance
issues.

“RCom can now support 1.6 billion CDRs a day, more than three times the
previous throughput, without any additio­nal investment in server resources,”
said Chowdhury. Downstream applications such as billing, intercarrier
settlements, business intelligence, and CRM now receive CDRs instantly, speeding
up the throughput of the mission-critical applications by 140 percent. By moving
the business intelligence workload off the main server, RCOM can now support a
staggering 70 million subscribers compared to the previous capacity of 23
million.

“With NetApp we have tripled the capacity for customer provisioning and
support processes,” Chowdhury said. “This was achieved by reducing CPU
utilization on the main server from 99 percent to 35 percent.”

On the deployment of this innovative solution, Chowdhury said, “Having it
perform flawlessly has given RCom the opportunity to rearchitect other pieces of
our systems and infrastructure and continue to beat our own TCO benchmarks.” A
willingness to step outside of a traditional IT approach and do what is best for
the business has opened the door for even more innovations with NetApp storage
in the future.

NR Sethuraman

sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in