State-of-the-art Compaq Alphaserver cluster handles 200 million Call Data Records (CDRs) per day.
- Linear scalability of InterconnecT meets needs of new entrant operators through to largest telecommunications companies
United Kingdom, 24th September 1999: Intec Telecom Systems today announced that benchmarking tests carried out at Compaq’s Telecom Competency Center in Sophia Antipolis, France, on a powerful Compaq AlphaServer cluster running UNIX with Intec Telecom Systems’ InterconnecT™, demonstrated superior results in dealing with telecoms billing at national PTT volumes - one of the world’s most demanding online processing applications. The tests showed that Intec Telecom Systems’ InterconnecT solution offers linear scalability on Compaq AlphaServers; from a simple single machine configuration required by the small operator, scaling to the processing volumes of the very largest national operators at 200 million+ Call Data Records (CDRs) in an eight hour period.
Rapid growth in worldwide call volumes, new IP-based services, and the increase in telecoms product complexity are presenting many carriers with a problem – how to accept, process and store the huge amount of call information generated. Interconnect billing (i.e. inter-carrier billing) can account for 50 per cent or more of a carrier’s revenues, represent billions of dollars, and is considered a mission-critical activity. Failure to deal with interconnect billing information can result in loss of revenue, contractual problems, or even regulatory difficulties.
“Carriers can only issue accurate bills to their interconnect partners if their systems can take the heavy loads generated by today’s call volumes and service complexity,” said Intec Telecom Systems’ Managing Director, Kevin Adams. “These tests show that InterconnecT is suitable for new entrant telcos needing excellent price/performance on single machine configurations, all the way up to national scale carriers implementing a clustered parallel processing design.”
Both absolute performance and scalability are key issues. A major national carrier may need to process upwards of 100 million calls per day through a billing system like InterconnecT. It must be certain it will cope with such numbers and with future traffic growth. Smaller telcos also need to know that any entry-level solution they choose will scale with them as their business volumes grow and will want to be certain of a cost-effective hardware configuration upgrade path.
Tom Yeates, Director High Performance Servers, Compaq Europe Middle East and Africa, said, “Billing is undoubtedly one of the most critical business systems in any company - in telecoms even more so. The need for an efficient, high performance, billing system with highest availability is crucial to the success of all operators, large or small. This joint benchmark with Intec not only proves the AlphaServer/InterconnecT solution ensuring the ultimate in performance and reliability when it comes to processing CDRs, but also offers unparalleled scalability with graduated configuration enhancements for new entrant operators.”
Benchmark Findings
- At optimum configuration, the tests indicated that in a single eight-hour period, 200 million+ Call Data Records (CDRs) can be processed by InterconnecT running in a Compaq AlphaServer GS140 cluster
- Looking at single machine configurations for smaller telco processing needs, maximum single machine performance was achieved on a Compaq AlphaServer GS140 with 12x525MHZ CPUs, and 8GB of memory. In this configuration, InterconnecT was shown to process up to 37 million CDRs in batch throughput when running a single Oracle database instance (version 7.3.4.3.0)
- Running on a Compaq AlphaServer ES40 at an optimum configuration of 4x500 Mhz CPUs and 8 GB of memory and a single Oracle instance returned a maximum throughput of 18 million CDRs in an eight hour period