NETWORKING STORAGE: Future Shock

Although the total wireless market continues to expand, the
actual rate of growth has, for the first time, declined. Capital expenditures
are being questioned more thoroughly and the very survival of many operators
hinges on their ability to collect enough revenues to cover the cost of keeping
services flowing. Against this backdrop, operators are struggling to utilize
their resources more wisely while still creating new services to keep existing
subscribers and attract new ones. Since 40 percent of the population is yet to
try wireless services, there is still considerable market potential.

The convergence of content, mobile telephony services, and
the Internet is creating market expectations for wireless access to information–anytime,
anywhere. Maintaining a leadership position among the growing number of
companies offering these services will demand the highest levels of flexibility
and agility. The leaders will be those organizations that can deliver content in
any format to any device without disruption to service, at the lowest possible
cost.

Content
as a Driving Force

The amount of information being created every day continues to grow
dramatically. A study by the School of Information Management Systems at the
University of California, Berkley, found that more information will be created
over the next two years than has been created over the entire history of
mankind.

Wireless: Unleashing Access To Information

As the wireless wave gains momentum, the information available through
mobile devices will grow in richness, complexity and volume. Expanded access
through wireless will drive content creation, content demand, and more
customized information services as consumer expectations grow with new
technological capabilities. The true value to both business and consumer will be
in managing all this content. For example, as billing systems become more
expansive, companies will generate more data and need to do more with that
content. In addition to transactional content, wireless expansion will also
create network-based user information, previously not available.

With the financial pressures mounting daily for wireless
service providers, new business models are constantly being explored and tested
in effort to distinguish one operator’s products from another while gaining
the elusive loyalty factor that makes the service quality a distinction, and
creates useful and ‘sticky’ service offerings. Carriers in the US and Canada
are experimenting with a variety of offerings ranging from gaming sessions,
downloaded ring tones and logos, instant messaging, and data delivery pricing
models.

New Services, New Headaches?

In addition to designing and deploying new services, operators must also
deal with significant changes in their billing environments. Trustworthy, timely
and convenient billing is the bedrock of an operator’s revenue assurance. With
every call detail record (CDR) generated, operators create data from which to
generate bills, provide billing statements and ultimately collect revenues.
Aligned with the many billing changes, operators also need to contend with a
variety of internal IT management issues including:

n Deciding how
much information must be collected to pay the content providers.

n Managing the
processes and costs associated with collecting information for new services such
that they don’t negatively impact the revenues generated from these new
services.

n Determining how
carriers can/should offer the security needed to be sure an enterprise customer’s
content is delivered only to its mobile workers

n Provisioning
new services on the fly–making sure operations systems are in synch with
service inventory and call collection systems.

Given the terabytes of information a typical telco generates
every month and the pressure to increase average revenues per user (ARPU) as
well as reduce churn, a robust and specialized information infrastructure is
needed.

Solid Infrastructure Is a Must

Moving from a voice-centric business model to an information services
delivery model will undoubtedly take time. It will also require many changes to
network elements, intelligent switches, added computer intelligence in the
remote data centers and/or central offices, as well as changes in how often and
where information is collected while it is stored and distributed to keep
traffic revenues from slipping away without having to deny services for lack of
current customer location and/or service order data.

This is where having the right infrastructure actually
becomes business critical. Depending on each operator’s billing environment,
this information infrastructure will comprise tools that:

n Simplify and
automate management of hardware or software from multiple storage vendors,
networks and hosts

n Speed up access
to and smooth the movement of data to help consolidate and distribute
information, and

n Improve data
recovery and provide business continuance in the event of system failure

Today, many operators utilize a combination of tape and
disk-based systems, often combined into storage area networks (SANs) to deposit
the validated call records, which can number in the hundreds of thousands per
hour. But what will happen when next generation services enter the picture? How
can systems process up to 500,000 calls a day if each CDR is a few hundred bytes
long? Most analysts predict that deployment of IP-based services and mobile
commerce can boost the amount of information collected substantially.

A Business Case

The prevailing storage philosophies for wireless service providers have been
built around traditional circuit-based voice messaging systems. In building this
infrastructure, operators often rely on traditional quantification of the amount
of data stored to create invoices and batch-oriented approaches to call- and
network-performance data statistics collection.

A full financial, business and operational assessment will
bring forth a compelling case for data storage specifically linked to the needs
and challenges of billing managers. These include managing and reducing costs,
absorbing changes to the systems when new lines of business are added or
dropped, and staying one step ahead of the competition by providing more
information and consolidating bills. In practical terms, this involves timely
access to current data that can also deliver several substantial benefits such
as:

n Reduction in
‘revenue leakage’ due to call detail records lost during peak volume time or
due to information transfer inefficiencies

n Creation of a
way of collecting and filtering information needed to bill for all services
rendered to customers as opposed to ‘flat rate’ billing

n Faster access
to call records for fraud detection processing

n Maximized cash
flow by shortening the billing cycle and increasing the number of invoicing
dates

n Analyzes
customer information for target marketing and service preferences

n Improved time
to market by speeding production of database refreshes after application
software or process testing

Caution! Changes Ahead

With the advent of the wireless Internet, the need for more robust
infrastructures will be vital to facilitate the daily movement of hundreds of
millions of data records from the edge of the network to the central office. The
major considerations for wireless operators will be the move from the
traditional CDR for voice-based services, to the new wave of data, voice,
multimedia and transactional services which will be represented by IPDR
(basically IP protocol packets of data containing all the necessary information
for charging, fraud analysis, QoS.) IPDRs may sometimes represent a higher value
item (i.e. revenue for current sports scores) than the revenue for voices calls.
Hence the need to implement business processes that will allow real-time
mediation and billing. In fact, this is an imperative for any business that
wishes to be successful in this economy by linking the transaction to a
service-based approach.

Storage strategies need to be re-evaluated to encompass new requirements. It
will no longer be a packaged solution sitting on a server in isolation. There is
a need to ensure that the transactional systems link the data streams from user
to provider and ensure that services are charged correctly, and billed according
to the customer’s SLA. This will be essential to ensure market acceptance and
success of new products such as gaming, advertising, financial services, or
micro payment services for parking, vending machines, and bus tickets.

Creating a Ripple Effect

Just as the intelligence resident at the central office, base station, or
service control point must be upgraded and dynamically structured to support
changing network requirements, data management within the network’s
distributed sites must be done.

Along with the migration from traditional equipment to client/servers and
soft switches comes the need to migrate from software buffers of information to
a reliable storage infrastructure at the edge of the network.

Individually, each application may involve small amounts of information.
However, the collective whole will add up to the equivalent of a small storage
network that can be contained on a rack or shelf within a server blade
appliance. From a content delivery perspective, the need to have an intelligent
storage network at the edge of the network will be critical to manage, protect,
and move structured or unstructured content (video, photos) in a
third-generation ‘always on’ mobile world.

Driven by requirements such as provisioning new services, expanding customer
services and updating operational systems, operators are experiencing increases
in the size and quantity of data marts or data warehouses they manage. Wireless
operators have an opportunity to change from an application centric viewpoint to
a service delivery viewpoint when architecting the data storage network for both
operations and business systems.

The Final Analysis

It’s all about business performance–whether that is related to improving
internal efficiencies and effectiveness, or competitive advantage and return on
shareholder equity. The real significance of deploying the ‘right’
information storage strategy is enabling carriers to extend their capabilities
into additional business support system areas while addressing operational
support systems and networking. It is the deployment of this kind of strategy
that will drive the right kind of business performance.

T Srinivasan country manager, EMC