An Oracle White Paper April 2013 Accelerating Billing Infrastructure Deployment While Reducing Risk and Cost
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Executive Overview Today, integrated revenue and customer management solutions not only enhance revenue stream capture for service providers, but also they build the brand of their services. But the scale, performance, and availability demands of these solutions are daunting. Many service providers have millions of subscribers and require millisecond response times with tens of thousands of operations per second all while requiring absolute mission-critical reliability and accuracy. Moreover, the IT infrastructure required to meet these needs is often complex, risk prone, and costly. IT organizations are accountable for ensuring maximum reliability and availability while under constant pressure to add new capabilities in a rapid manner, increase performance to support growth, and contain costs. This paper outlines how Oracle's investments in SPARC SuperCluster enable IT organizations to overcome these difficult and often opposing challenges. Introduction Oracle is a premier provider of billing and revenue management solutions for the global communications, media, entertainment, information services and cloud markets. Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management software is a service agnostic application, allowing service providers to monetize and maximize each revenue stream for any customer type, service offering, partner relationship, payment method, business model, or geography. Additionally, Oracle Solaris and Oracle s SPARC servers have held a strong position as a deployment platform for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management due to their superior availability, scale, and performance characteristics. 1
However, IT organizations have had to end-to-end architect, design, size, and build their own infrastructure for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. Moreover, they must today design for the following objectives. Growth of subscriber base and subscriber services drives ever-higher levels of scale: millions of subscribers and tens of thousands of transactions per second. Greater usage of converged billing for online and offline charging demands millisecond response times. The highest levels of mission-critical availability to ensure non-stop service offers and to minimize revenue leakage. Optimizing any of these alone is difficult enough. But doing all three at the same time and in light of the pressure to deliver more quickly with less time and cost is very challenging. This is why Oracle has invested significantly in the development of engineered systems like the SPARC SuperCluster, which combine the best elements of Oracle s hardware and software portfolio to provide a complete solution designed to reduce overall ownership costs, reduce IT and business risks, and yet enable greater efficiency and business agility to support evolving needs. 2
Compressing Time to Revenue The pressure to deploy IT projects more quickly, with reduced cost and implicit better accuracy in meeting the service levels, is only increasing in today s cost conscious world. But this is not just about saving money to push more top line revenue to the bottom line. Billing and revenue management systems are about making money and enhancing service delivery brand in other words, driving top line revenue growth. Shorter durations to enhanced revenue capture, combined with the lower costs inherent with a shorter time to deploy, are driving more new top line growth to the bottom line. Shortening the overall deployment times is a major design goal for Oracle engineered systems. Oracle s Time to Deployment Advantage Deployment upon Oracle engineered systems shortens overall deployment time and removes risk in two areas. Installation and configuration of the infrastructure (the SPARC SuperCluster itself) Installation and configuration of the many software components in the solution In this example of a complex, multitier solution that has Web, application, and database components, these advantages become marked. Figure 1 below compares deployment duration times between SPARC SuperCluster-based deployments and typical do-it-yourself (DIY) deployments. 200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 7.4x Infrastructure Installation and Configuration SPARC SuperCluster Do It Yourself 3.2x Software Installation and Configuration Figure 1. Installation and configuration time in hours Minimizing Uncrate to Rate Time The Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management is able to be deployed much more quickly than a conventional deployment approach because it is built upon an Oracle engineered system the SPARC SuperCluster. The SPARC SuperCluster is ready built, racked, and wired with all the 3
compute, storage, and networking needed to implement the Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management server functions. This engineering work removes guesswork and can reduce variability in project schedules. In addition, with Oracle having completed significant portions of integration and deployment activities prior to arriving at a data center, deployment on SPARC SyperCluster shortens design, build, integration, and validation schedules so they are up to five times shorter than conventional deployment methods. In this way a company s IT staff can spend more time on strategic projects, reduce IT project backlog, and get to deployment and revenue generating value more quickly. Abating Risk for the Mission-Critical Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Solution Revenue is the lifeblood of any business. As such, businesses spend significant time designing business processes that are as innovative and robust as their pricing and service offers. Failure to do so risks: Revenue leakage or even revenue loss Potential loss of services if unable to authenticate or charge in real time Impairment of brand with inaccurate billing or loss of service availability Because of this, Oracle understands that billing revenue management system is mission-critical. This means that both the software application and its infrastructure must be highly available. The SPARC SuperCluster is designed for real world deployment. While Oracle provides benchmark results to allow apples-to-apples comparison to other benchmark configurations, Oracle s focus in on providing real world sizing and real world characterization in light of faults and component failures that may occur throughout the overall solution. This pretesting and risk abatement expresses itself in two distinct values. Deployment value of a factory pre-built infrastrcuture: Deploy with confidence and enhanced certainty for time to production Free up IT staff for more strategic projects Business and operational value of a hardened architecture: Non-stop revenue collection with online rating, billing, and revenue management Preservation of customer experience and brand: no loss of service delivery related to charging Oracle s Availability Advantages Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management software is in itself designed to be capable of being deployed in high availability architecture. This is done by proper redundancy of the various software components, as the application tier is basically stateless. Converged billing and real time prepaid, in particular, derive performance benefit from the use of caches. Depending upon the version of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, these caches are based upon different 4
technology platforms. But in all cases these caches can be made highly available through the use of sharing and replication technologies. Of course, this software availability must be built on the foundation of a highly available and robust deployment infrastructure. SPARC SuperCluster and High Availability As the name implies, the SPARC SuperCluster uses a variety of clustering and partitioning technologies to ensure it is deployed with no single point of failure. First of all, Oracle Database 11g is designed for high availability and is deployed in the SPARC SuperCluster along with the following Oracle technologies to help ensure non-stop operation of the database: Oracle s Grid Infrastructure Oracle Real Application Clusters Oracle Automatic Storage Management The Oracle Database as well as all of the application components and caches run on the rock solid Oracle Solaris operating system. To further enhance availability, this solution uses Oracle Solaris Zones to isolate key software components so they may be clustered and restarted automatically using Oracle Solaris Cluster. Key functions are further isolated using Oracle VM Server for SPARC virtualization technology. Finally, all the compute, storage, and networking inside of the SPARC SuperCluster are built using best-of-breed, enterprise-grade components. This unique combination of innovations and technologies ensure the your Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management deployment is robust and fault tolerant to meet business needs. Availability Characterization of Software and Hardware Together One of the hallmarks of a solution for real world deployment is it s characterization of fault detection times, failover times, and recovery times as well as times for restoration and fault repair. Having this evidence available gives IT departments the confidence to deploy more quickly and with vigor. Testing of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management on SPARC SuperCluster has demonstrated that even using real-time rating, failover from primary to secondary cache takes about 13seconds at full load. Moreover, after failed primary is restarted, it is ready is 22 minutes to recover with all subscriber data for that cache partition. So this unique combination of highly available components and well-defined and hardened practices delivers unparalleled levels of solution availability consistent with mission-critical billing and revenue management systems. Reducing Cost in Capturing Revenue Reducing time to deploy and reducing risk often mean reducing performance and solution efficiency. But this is not the case with the SPARC SuperCluster. This solution using SPARC SuperCluster virtualization leads to better server utilization by being able to partition nodes and assign CPU resources as needed. Table 1 compares similarly tuned and tested 12 million GSM subscriber single rack solutions, each using four schemas. 5
TABLE 1. THROUGHPUT PER CORE ORACLE COMMUNICATIONS BILLING AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT USING SPARC SUPERCLUSTER VS. RACK OF X86 12 MILLION SUBSCRIBER GSM BUSINESS PROCESS WORKLOADS FULL RACK SPARC SUPERCLUSTER SOLUTION FULL RACK X86 SOLUTION SPARC SUPERCLUSTER SOLUTION ADVANTAGE Prepaid charging and rating throughput 95175 calls/hour 52892 calls/hour 1.8x Real-time rating, in calls per hour Postpaid (Batch) charging and rating throughput 656691 386294 1.7x Call Data Records per hour (CDRs/hour) CDRs/hour CDRs/hour Postpaid billing, with deferred taxation 7.55 bills/sec 5.35 bills/sec 1.4x Invoicing with detailed usage history 13.6 invoices/sec 6.8 invoices/sec 2x The overall throughput and cost of acquired hardware alone is similar for these two examples listed in Table 1, with the SPARC SuperCluster-based solution having a slight advantage. However, because the SPARC SuperCluster-based solution utilizes fewer CPU cores, fewer licenses are needed to do the same work. This can have a big impact on reducing costs because software license costs for the IT infrastructure can be larger or much larger than hardware acquisition costs. As an example for the hardware/software infrastructure alone, this can mean up to 50 percent savings over conventional approaches assuming a company needs to acquire new licenses for a new or updated deployment. The bottom line is that the SPARC SuperCluster-based solution means being able to do more with less. Conclusion Billing and revenue management processes are vital to the success of any service delivery business. These business processes demand the highest levels of scale and responsiveness in their realization as systems. Moreover, the solutions implemented must be highly available while cost effectively optimizing performance and solution productivity. The Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management running on SPARC SuperCluster is a ready-built multimillion subscriber prepaid, postpaid, invoicing, and billing solution in a single rack that delivers: Faster time to revenue Lower business and operational risk in billing and revenue management Lower cost in capturing revenue streams This complete hardware and software infrastructure solution is able to deliver these results leveraging Oracle s significant investments in Oracle engineered systems. 6
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Accelerating Billing Infrastructure Deployment While Reducing Risk and Cost April 2013 Author: Randal Sagrillo Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. 0612 oracle.com