Driving Results

These are interesting times for the telecommunications industry. The

much-vaunted truly mobile customer is now a reality thanks to ubiquitous 3G and

Wi-Fi access. Convergence has also opened a world of opportunities for

telecommunications providers. The merger between media and telecommunications

has hardware and content to support the vision. While this presents huge market

potential for telecommunications providers, it also comes with a number of

challenges.

More significant is the change in customer needs and demands. Increasingly,

empowered end-users are demanding lower prices and more convenience. For

business service providers, companies are polarizing between volume-based

'utility' models and value-added, service-based models. Finally, regulation adds

another layer of complexity to the mix. To meet these different needs,

telecommunications providers are finding that networks and service delivery

models are growing in complexity. The need to properly manage data is paramount

as it has the power to enhance telecommunications-provider service offerings.

Reducing Complexity



Every region has a number of telecommunication providers and one cannot but

help noticing the extraordinary variety of components within their IT

infrastructure. For instance, there was one telecommunication operator who had

three different sets of storage systems. This threatened to take a toll on its

IT infrastructure, operations and maintenance, especially as the operator looked

to gain a single view of their users. With more than 100 servers running

different types of applications, there was no way for the operator to understand

and track what was happening.

It was important that all information from customer records, financial

systems, and employee resource planning (ERP) to the customer relationship

management (CRM) database and billing systems be accurate and up to date. It was

clear that direct attached storage for each server was no longer an option as it

did not meet new criteria for scalability and flexibility. In addition to this

challenge, a growing customer base was straining the capacity of existing

systems.

By implementing a virtualization-based data strategy, the company was able to

simplify the management and monitoring of storage thus allowing the company

greater flexibility in terms of data migration and data replication. The

operator was immediately able to see cost savings of 10-20% in human resources

as a result of decrease in the number of staff hours needed. They also made a

40% savings in hardware investments. Most importantly, the company was able to

monitor performance and ensure that more than 90% of its infrastructure was

utilized.

This is just one example as to how storage can help telecommunication

operators to meet any kind of technical or business challenges than face the

industry.

Innovative Storage Efficiency



In the fiercely competitive telecommunications industry, time to market and

the roll out new products and services ahead of competition is extremely

crucial. Ensuring that mission-critical records, such as voice and general

packet radio service (GPRS) data are available and efficiently backed up coupled

with minimal disruption to customers is also a top concern. The need for an

innovative storage design and management is loud and clear.

An efficient and innovative SAN implementation can help telecommunications

operators to unlock value from existing data and address the issue of

scalability by optimizing resource usage and enabling storage to be provisioned

easily as demands emerge. Managing storage tasks across the enterprise from a

central console also helps in meeting service requests and replicate data at a

faster pace.

Excellent customer service levels can be maintained, as efficient storage

systems has the power to fortify data availability and minimize

downtime-scheduled and unscheduled-by providing customer service staff with

uninterrupted access to account records and promotional offerings.

Supporting New Services



In Asia's competitive marketplaces, ingenuity, creative content, and the

ability to recognize and respond to rapidly changing customer demand is

important. Lighting fast storage and 100% uptime while handling billions of

files and hundreds of terabytes is crucial, and a day's delay can make a

difference.

Maintaining the lead in the telecommunications market is serious

business-each time a service is introduced, it must be put through a test

environment and a user acceptance testing system before going into production.

For operator, this involves configuring a system as quickly as possible and

providing the required data. But with a direct attached storage (DAS)

infrastructure in place with a concurrent fragmentation of resources, operators

can take up to two-three days to clone an environment.

To meet these challenges, progressive organizations have adopted a services

oriented approach to manage core IT functions like storage.

By utilizing a service oriented storage solutions strategy, operators have

found that they can easily unlock value from existing data and address the issue

of scalability by optimizing resource usage and enabling storage to be

provisioned easily as demands emerge. Some operators report an increase of 40%

in the utilization of their systems and decrease in time to market.

Meeting Requirements



There is an increasing pressure on telecommunication providers to comply

with various data retention regulations to meet the needs of investigating and

law enforcement agencies. The EU Data Retention Directive, for instance,

requires telecommunication service providers and internet service providers to

capture and store data from a variety of services they offer. This includes

storing of data generated from their fixed line services, mobile and internet

services, messaging services and email etc.

This data needs to be stored for a specified period of time sometimes ranging

from six months to two years. This translates to storing a huge amount of data

and the problem compounds when telecommunication providers have to retrieve the

data whenever required by the law enforcement agencies. The EU directive

requires service providers to store a call detail record (CDR) that contains

information regarding the time, duration, and location of origination and

termination of the call. Experts estimate that this will amount to archiving and

retrieving around 2 terabytes of data per year and the storage systems should be

able to maintain several petabytes of information in order to meet the

requirement and remain scalable.

Most telecommunication providers have data archival systems that are not

designed to meet the regulatory compliance requirements. The content archiving

systems required to meet the regulatory requirement should be robust enough to

retain CDRs in their original format ensuring integrity data together with

advanced encryption capabilities to maintain authenticity of the content.

Further the data archiving solutions should also be built using open

standards so that they can freely integrate with existing archiving systems

allowing service providers to re-evaluate the way they archive and manage all

their data.

Again, this calls for an integrated and comprehensive storage strategy that

allows service providers to get unified view of their, otherwise disparate,

storage environment and meet their data archiving requirements via a single

repository capable of holding both structured and unstructured data.

In Conclusion



While mapping storage strategy, telecommunications organizations need ask

some critical questions like: Is the mission-critical data protected? Are we

prepared for future growth? Is our customer getting the right information at the

right time? The next-generation telecommunications services will see an array of

new services like WiMax, and getting the customers mind map will be even more

critical.

What we do know is that an effective data management is a proven accelerator

that can drive results, increase flexibility to meet unpredictable changes in

demand, and can inevitably improve the customer experience. And there are no two

ways about it.

Arun Singh Sajwan



The author is regional director, North & East India, Hitachi Data Systems


vadmail@cybermedia.co.in