Iskratel more than doubles call processing capacity with IBM solidDB to service 2 million calls at peak hours

Iskratel is a leading developer of adapted and highly integrated solutions in the field of communications for fast-growing convergent networks. The high quality of its advanced high-technology networking elements and infrastructure configurations makes the company one of the key innovators of such technologies.

Challenge
Iskratel’s SI3000 family of products enables telecom providers to deliver the full range of voice, data and multimedia services for both end-users and business users. The telecommunications equipment supports fixed, mobile, IP and voice-over-IP (VoIP) networks, delivering the necessary products to control the next-generation network elements. Iskratel products exercise service, call session and connection control for NGN (Next Generation Network) call servers, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) servers, IMS-based (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture products and media gateways. Vital to the success of the SI3000 products is the underlying database technology where subscriber data, service details and configuration settings are maintained. Andrej Ciglič, Iskratel’s director of Research & Development, explains: “The ability of our applications to access the database in microseconds is a critical issue. Any delays would further delay the provisioning and configuration of services leaving serious repercussions for telecom providers.”

The company has traditionally used an internally developed in-memory database to deliver rapid access to information (90 percent of the workload is read requests). However, as Iskratel sought to expand its reach worldwide and support increasingly sophisticated high-volume telecom services, the company realized this database simply couldn’t deliver the capacity, reliability or redundancy required. “Our goal is to become a worldwide supplier of telecommunications equipment, targeting more than €100 million in revenue annually,” says Ciglič. “The ability to process more BHCAs [busy hour call attempts] means higher system capacity, which will allow us to support new markets and services.”

Solution
Working with IBM® database experts, Iskratel implemented the IBM solidDB® relational, in-memory database as the foundation for its telecommunications equipment. The development staff evaluated solidDB against several other databases and selected solidDB according to its high performance and speed. “We evaluated other similar products and found out that these databases accessed data in the range of milliseconds,” says Ciglič. “With solidDB, we access data in the range of microseconds.”

Besides its extreme speed delivery, solidDB offered a dramatic boost in database performance. For telecom providers, the key metric of performance is busy hour call attempts (BHCA)—the number of telephone calls that are supported at peak hours of the day. Previously, Iskratel’s equipment supported about 200,000 BHCAs. Today, through product innovations and the use of solidDB, Iskratel supports upwards of 1 million BHCAs. The company expects a growth in capacity to more than 2 million BHCAs with the implementation of solidDB 6.5. “Our use of shared memory access in the latest release of solidDB will enable us to double capacity and achieve response times nearly three times faster,” says Ciglič.

Extreme availability of the database—99.9999 percent availability with subsecond recovery capabilities—was also necessary as any outages can result in not achieving service level agreements (SLAs), ultimately causing customer dissatisfaction. The solidDB relational, in-memory database can be deployed in a two-node, hot-standby configuration with two copies of the data synchronized at all times. Therefore, Iskratel’s system is able to re-establish data access in less than a second in case of a failure, completely transparent to Iskratel’s customers. solidDB also helps Iskratel to reduce time-to-market for new products—such as SIP servers and IMS solutions for delivery of multimedia and Web services—as Iskratel’s applications can take advantage of solidDB through standard ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) and JDBC (Java™ Database Connectivity) SQL interfaces. “We were surprised with how easy the deployment was,” says Ciglič. “The open interfaces and ability to easily integrate solidDB into our offering will likely enable us to go to market one or two years earlier with our new products.”

Benefits
· More than doubles call processing capacity to support 2 million BHCAs
· Improves customer satisfaction by enabling three times faster response times and continual service availability
· Reduces time-to-market by up to two years, decreases development costs, and enables much faster expansion into new markets