Telecommunications

The number of mobile subscribers worldwide is expected to reach close to 4 billion in 2011, propelling seismic differences in the way we use mobile devices. No longer relied upon solely for voice calls, the mobile handset has given us a way to share information and be entertained through web browsing, alerts, photo and text messaging, games, and even television.

Telecommunications billing practices have had to keep pace with the explosion of data and voice services. Service providers have migrated to real-time billing, authorizing, rating, and charging postpaid and prepaid accounts in real-time. By relying on call detail records that track every detail of the transaction, real-time billing provides immediate account balances—a boon to the subscriber as well as to the service provider. The subscriber can access account information immediately on their handset or online, while carriers can rely upon this source of market intelligence to structure new promotion campaigns.

In addition to processing billing records, other compute intensive operations include voice, text and instant message archival, as well as delivering advanced data services such as television. Mobile television delivery requires continuous content aggregation, file transcoding, and extremely fast streaming capabilities.

Challenges:

• Call detail records are small files which contain call origination, duration, and service information. It’s not uncommon for Tier 1 service providers to require aggregate throughput in excess of 1 million call detail records per second or 4 billion events per hour, an I/O throughput requirement which is orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of conventional network-attached storage solutions.
• Service providers archive call detail records in order to conduct profitability analytics and to determine whether new pricing models are required. This data can easily amount to hundreds of terabytes to petabytes per year, requiring a scalable file system capable of managing this growth.

IBRIX Fusion is ideally suited for the intensive processing requirements and demanding workloads that advanced applications require. Its unsurpassed support of high transaction rates can open the I/O floodgates, allowing processors to be fully utilized. Its flexible architecture enables IT to easily build large repositories by adding capacity and components on demand without outages. Open and modular in nature, IBRIX Fusion can be scaled for any size installation to maximize capital investments and ensure on-time project completion.

 You’ve got a lot of content that’s being either access or worked on at the same time, by a lot of different people at the same time—so that data needs to be in multiple places all of the time and doing that is almost impossible with traditional technologies. The volumes of data we’re talking about and the file sizes we’re talking about and the sheer numbers of files is pretty much unprecedented.
Simon Robinson, The 451 Group, July 2007

IBRIX Fusion software enables fast, scalable access to data in real-time so Telecommunications companies can:

• Increase CDR processing by up to 6 times
• Maximize processing utilization and storage hardware
• Create a scalable digital asset online archive at low, single-digit cost per gigabyte
• Simplify management while maximizing flexibility
• Scale storage capacity and performance as needs grow, without forklift upgrades and downtime