Mobile Networks Business Unit

Short Messaging System

• 200% performance improvement
• Cost per message reduced by nearly two-thirds

Company
Integrator B is a diversified global provider of system integration, turnkey solutions, and business process outsourcing, with nearly $2B in annual revenues and offices in over 30 countries. Its markets include telecommunications, energy, utilities, financial services, and transportation.

Mobile Networks Business Unit
Expected to exceed 100 billion messages per month, Short Messaging System (SMS) traffic is growing explosively worldwide. The open SMS platform developed by Integrator B's Mobile Networks business unit (MNBU) enables its operator-customers to capitalize on this emerging trend.

SMS Solution
One of the world's leading SMS offerings, the platform provides a turnkey solution for Mobile Internet, WAP, GPRS, and 3G mobile networks, and is the only SMS product that supports major mobile technologies (e.g., TDMA and CDMA) worldwide. A comprehensive, best-of- breed offering, it's notable for reliability, scalability, and market-leading performance at minimum cost.

Architectural Challenges
Exceptionally high performance is mandatory for such features as real-time billing, account updates, and complete call-detail records for large wireless subscriber bases. The system must economically accommodate widely varying levels of network traffic, and, like any carrier-grade service, it must be highly reliable and always available.

Integrator B's ability to deliver many messaging services hinges on the update and management of a single database "messaging table," which not only captures the delivery status of messages, but is used to deliver real-time service usage and wireless account balances. The speed at which this table can be accessed and updated determines system performance under heavy loads.

Solution: Solid Data Solid-State Disks
Integrator B's SMS system configuration delivers maximum performance and high availability using mirrored pairs of Solid Data 900 Class Solid-State Disks, each with 10GB capacity. In actual benchmarks at a major Asian wireless operator using a Hewlett-Packard K-Class server, this configuration increased daily message capacity from 400,000 to 1,300,000 by providing zero-latency random access to the messaging table data and elimination of "I/O wait" by the server processor, which was previously limited by the I/O subsystem.

Eliminating the I/O wait also improved other critical OA&M (Operation, Administration and Maintenance) functions. For example, the solid-state disks reduced the normal purge cycle of database records from nine to three hours.

Bill generation from SMS records requires data persistence, protection, and operational reliability. Here, Solid Data solid-state disks offer speed approaching that of main memory, along with data persistence. Moreover, the system is more reliable because data access is electronic rather than mechanical.

SMS Architecture Solid-state disk produced dramatic results, increasing message capacity per day by over 200% and reducing cost per message by 65%. This improvement was achieved with an incremental investment equal to 15% of the base cost.

Result
Solid-State disks clearly deliver a compelling payoff. With only a nominal incremental investment, Integrator B achieved more than 200% performance improvement and reduced per-message costs by nearly two-thirds, from 5.1 cents to 1.8 cents.

For additional information, contact Solid Data.

Short Messaging System Case Study PDF: 72 KB (sms_case.pdf)

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