The advent of the 5G era has created a platform for carriers' business to evolve and adapt to the exponentially increasing number of connections, such as 10-fold higher workloads over the 4G era. However, traditional IT systems built for 4G networks often struggle with performance bottlenecks, making it impossible to meet requirements of large-volume data in the 5G era.

Core systems such as billing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are considered the heartbeat of carriers' IT infrastructure. The operation efficiency of these systems, particularly those are sensitive to latency and response time, is closely related to user experience. Huawei believes that OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage is the key to improving this issue. This article discusses all-flash storage benefits for three typical types of carriers' core systems: billing, CRM, and ERP.

Monthly settlement used to be the biggest headache for carriers' IT personnel. It requires a summary of all fees such as package, phone call, and data traffic of subscribers in the last month to generate detailed bills for each subscriber. The whole process usually takes a long time during which subscribers may encounter system failures when querying their detailed bills. Similarly, generating bills and invoices often meant subscribers had to wait long for the customer support hotline when they want to question their package usage.

It is a consensus of all carriers that shorter bill generation time lowers the amount of workloads and IT personnel. What are the reasons for lengthy bill generation? To answer this question, Huawei has analyzed the billing systems of carrier X and found that the problem did not lie with server performance, storage IOPS, and storage bandwidth, all of which were sufficient.

However, the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) in Oracle Database 10g on the carrier's live network often encountered a latency bottleneck (the I/O response time reached 10 ms). As a result, the time spent in waiting for the I/O responses of the Oracle database accounted for 70% of the total business processing time. Huawei concluded that the carrier's storage latency was a key factor that affected the monthly settlement.

To eliminate the storage latency bottleneck, the carrier chose Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage to replace its traditional storage on the live network. Dorado reduced the storage latency to less than 1 ms and shortened the proportion of Oracle I/O waiting time to business processing time to just 7%, down by 90%. The speed needed to process bills and invoices increased from 140 transactions per second (TPS) to 370 TPS, up by more than 160%. The shorter storage latency helped reduce the bill generation time by 63%, from 10 hours to 3.7 hours.

In addition, the call completion rate (CCR) of the call center was restored to the normal level or more than 85%. The number of subscriber complaints per day caused by delayed resumption is reduced from 300 to zero. Such improvements to their service means that business support personnel are now freed from long busy working hours under smaller workloads. All of these benefits meant that fewer consultations were needed and that there was a reduction in complaints at the beginning of each month.

CRM systems are the focus of optimization for carriers' IT departments. The core database of a CRM system comprises key data of user, product, subscription, and channel, all of which are accessed every day and cause the database to be busy all the time. The response capability of the database is directly related to user experience.

Huawei found that the service loads of the CRM system of the Carrier X change regularly. For example, peak hours were at the beginning of each month, as well as from 9:00 to 10:00 and 14:00 to 15:00 every day with the transactions volume several times that of the off-peak hours. The legacy CRM system was designed to bear the average volume of workloads in the industry and subsequently failed to support large numbers of transactions during peak hours. In addition, the system was idle during off-peak hours. To address this challenge, Huawei evaluated the IT support system's resource usage during peak hours.

According to the evaluation, 35% to 50% of time was wasted in waiting for the I/O responses of the Oracle database on the live network, and the high storage latency was the root cause. Huawei concluded that optimizing the storage latency can help significantly improve the performance of the CRM's core database.

The average latency of existing HDD storage systems was 3 ms to 10 ms, which was insufficient to meet the CRM requirements. In contrast, Huawei's OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage generally controls the average storage latency within 1 ms, improving CRM's response capabilities. Dorado utilizes FlashLink?, Huawei's proprietary technology, to optimize both storage systems and SSDs. Combined with the NVMe architecture, Dorado provides a predictably low latency of less than 0.5 ms, accelerating the average transaction processing and reducing the business rejection rate of the CRM system in comparison to legacy storage with the same configurations.

According to the service tests of multiple carriers, OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage Systems helps reduce the average transaction processing time by up to 74%, from 4 to 7 seconds to 1.8 seconds. The average business rejection rate is decreased down by 87.5%, from 0.4% to less than 0.05%, and the storage performance is 4 times higher, without the need to change their upper-layer applications. This helps eliminate complaints caused by service timeout during monthly settlement and improve user satisfaction.

For Carrier X, an ERP system mainly comprises inventory, procurement, order business modules, and financial modules such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, and cash. The system manages all assets and financial aspects, whereas the planning and decision-making methods are based on monthly settlement reports. The most important part is the financial monthly settlement report, which helps the executives develop sales strategies and business models to match the latest business trends.

However, the carrier was frequently challenged by slow monthly settlement, which usually took several days. The delayed report output often led to delayed or insufficient decision from the business departments, which directly decreased the revenue and profits of the carrier.

According to the analysis of the carrier's ERP system, the monthly financial settlement involved front-end web access and back-end request processing. The web access response at the front end took several seconds while the average processing time of a back-end request reached more than half an hour, directly resulting in lengthy monthly settlement.

Huawei also conducted a comprehensive test on the carrier's ERP system and found that neither the efficiency of the CPU nor that of software platform was the root cause of the delayed monthly settlement. The root cause lied in the database. The database storage latency was up to 10 ms, and 66% of the total business processing time was wasted in waiting for the storage responses.

After detailed evaluation from multiple aspects on storage systems offered by many vendors, Carrier X chose Huawei's OceanStor All-Flash Storage because of its high performance. Dorado helped the carrier reduce the storage latency from 10 ms to less than 1 ms. The average processing time of a back-end request was shortened from more than half an hour to less than 3 minutes, helping shorten the monthly financial settlement time from 5 days to about 12 hours and less. Now, the financial report can be presented to business departments and senior executives on the first day of each month to support quick decision-making of sales strategies for the month.

Carriers can significantly improve the efficiency of their core business systems, especially billing, CRM, and ERP, by using OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage Systems. The Dorado storage family can help improve service experience at a low cost. The data reduction technologies of Dorado help reduce the actual data volume on storage by at least 50%, making the purchase costs of all-flash storage systems nearly the same as that of traditional high-end storage. Thanks to the 9x higher capacity density offered by Dorado, the footprint and energy consumption of Dorado is more than 90% lower than those of traditional storage with the same capacity. In general, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Dorado all-flash storage is reduced by 50% to 60% compared with that of traditional storage over a five-year period.

Huawei is the only vendor to boast proprietary storage systems, SSDs, and storage chips in the industry. Huawei's OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage series adopts FlashLink? that supports simultaneous optimization of SSDs and storage systems, a trait unique in the industry. OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage series is the first to support an NVMe architecture for all storage models in the industry. It ensures industry-leading 0.5 ms predictably low latency and provides a better all-flash storage performance compared with counterparts with the same configurations.

With OceanStor Dorado, carriers now enjoy faster business processing, especially monthly settlement, and quicker decision-making. OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage is definitely an ideal choice for carriers to address the challenges faced by core business systems in the 5G era.