Competitive pressures have brought profound change to the telecommunications industry. Telecom companies have seen a rise in new digital devices and changing business models for delivering services, while traditional voice and messaging products have become commoditized, pushing prices downward. As a result, telecommunications companies have been aggressive in their adoption of open source technologies to modernize operations; find greater efficiencies and flexibility; reduce vendor lock-in to function with greater agility; and cut costs.
EnterpriseDB (EDB) is a partner to many major telecommunications companies worldwide, including KT Corporation in South Korea.
EDB enhances the capabilities of the open source database PostgreSQL with the EDB Postgres™ Platform, which gives customers the highest levels of performance, scalability, manageability, security, and compatibility. With the EDB Postgres Platform, customers receive all of the enterprise capabilities necessary to manage multi-model data, connect with existing systems, and deploy rapidly across multiple environments so they can modernize to meet today’s digital business demands.
100TB Migration Candidate
Among EDB’s telecom customers is one of the largest regional wireless carriers in the United States. The Carrier provides national network coverage and industry-leading innovations designed to elevate the customer experience. The Company has a strong line-up of cutting-edge devices that are all backed by a high-quality network in big and small cities and rural communities, and currently, 99 percent of customers have access to 4G LTE speeds.
The Company launched a corporate initiative to adopt more open source software for many of the same reasons as others in the telecom industry. It sought greater efficiency and flexibility from its infrastructure. The Company also wanted to improve its customer experience while reducing operating expenses.
As its first candidate for an open source-based software solution in the data center, the Company chose to migrate a 100TB mission-critical application from its legacy system, Oracle® Exadata, to the EDB Postgres Platform and Cloudera (Hadoop). The application stored geospatial information for wireless devices, as well as a range of device and user information, including regional activity patterns, data usage, and voice recordings (e.g., voicemail and call center interactions).
Four Pillars of Success
The migration from Oracle to EDB Postgres reduced the cost of running the application by several million dollars because it replaced the costly legacy system with EDB Postgres and Cloudera, both of which are low-cost open source-based data management solutions. The migration was completed in two weeks with EnterpriseDB managing the project to ensure the rapid success of the project.
EDB was able to support multiple goals for the Company:
- Migration: The Company utilized key enhancement features that EDB developed for Postgres, such as partitioning and heterogeneous database links that enable migrations from Oracle to EDB Postgres and ensure high performance.
- New Application Development: The application had run completely on Oracle Exadata. The application was redesigned so that EDB Postgres became the database of record but information was regularly sent to Cloudera where it was aggregated with huge volumes of archived data so it could be prepared for analytics. EDB Postgres uses EDB Data Adaptors to integrate with NoSQL solutions like Cloudera so data can pass back and forth seamlessly, as if part of a single database. Further, database administrators can manipulate data in Cloudera using EDB Postgres Data Adaptors, as if the Cloudera data were in Postgres tables. This gives Postgres DBAs powerful new control over structured and non-structured data, and much greater flexibility for developing new applications. Voice call traffic and recordings were also stored in Cloudera because the solution could better manage the huge volume this content generated.
- Integration: The new configuration was integrated into an existing storage array infrastructure from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The HPE solution had a flexible backup capability that was easily integrated with the EDB Postgres backup solution to provide timely and reliable backup and recovery. As a standards-based solution, EDB Postgres can integrate across multiple platforms in the data center.
- Modernization: The addition of Cloudera enables the Company to perform more advanced analytics than the prior solution could without refactoring, which would have come at significant cost. By reducing its spend, the Company can also invest in new strategic data-driven initiatives, such as creating a predictive environment based on user data to help migrate customers from older mobile phones to smartphones and improve user experience.
Conclusion
The Wireless Carrier is planning additional data-driven initiatives for future development phases of the application environment. Plans call for greater integration with other data sources across its infrastructure, as well as geospatial intelligence based on PostGIS, the powerful open source geospatial extension to Postgres.
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