Telco billing, both in the areas of landlines and cellular, is critical to the profitability of telecommunications providers. As such, the reliability of the hardware technology used to run these systems is equally critical.
Amdocs, global leader in telco billing, recently announced benchmark results demonstrating Sun Microsystems' ability to deliver outstanding telco billing performance.
Over 70 major telecommunications companies globally including a major South Africa telecomms provider use Amdocs' solutions.
At Telecom 99, held in Geneva, Amdocs and Sun Microsystems released benchmarks showing how Sun's top-end Starfire has established world record On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP) performance on telco billing, using Amdoc's software and the Oracle database.
"Telco billing is a highly important application for large servers - and it's one area that is truly mission-critical as any downtime or slowdown in performance by the hardware has huge financial implications for the telecommunications providers," comments Willem Coetsee, sales manager for telecommunications at Sun Microsystems SA.
"Amdocs is one of the most popular application packages for telco billing. We teamed up with them to benchmark Amdocs Ensemble, using a set of the main modules representing the heavy batch part of the Ensemble software. These components, including message acquisition and formatting and bill preparation, are very heavy consumers of CPU and database resources," he explains.
Using a single 64-way Sun Starfire server, configured with a subscriber database of 10 million business and residential subscribers, the system processed 1,425,178 subscribers/hour. In a separate test, the system prepared 102,000,000 billing statements per hour. The 64 CPU Sun Starfire server also demonstrated 91% linear scalability, proving the system's overall capacity and ability to accommodate very large databases and mixed workloads on the same system.
The system, running Amdocs Ensemble (TM) and Solaris 7 operating environment, was configured with 64 UltraSPARC II 400 MHZ CPUs, each with a 8 MB external cache, 64 GB of memory combined with 9 Sun StorEdge disk subsystems totaling 2 TB of storage. Tests were conducted at Sun's Large Scale Computing Center in Beaverton, Oregon, US.
Share