Nizhny Novgorod Mobile Business: Projections for Millions of Subscribers

Oleg Sedov

Next year, CJSC NSS — the key player of Russia’s «third capital» mobile market (about half of the local market) will celebrate its 10th anniversary and together with it more than 500,000 GSM subscribers. As the customer base builds up, so does the demand for services, intelligent services, in the first place.
To meet the new requirements, the company intensified its effort to scale up current networks, using CBOSS software/hardware platforms built on Sun Microsystems servers. Solutions based on Sun Microsystems technology are widely used by European mobile operators and vendors and have long become a corporate standard. Sun Microsystems estimates that in Russia, similarly, some 70 % of telcos choose Sun technology to operate their businesses.

IKS #10, October 2004

About two years ago NSS’s growth rates suggested that its billing system, poorly adjusted to the Russian market, should be replaced with an affordable CBOSSprepaid platform on Sun Enterprise 6500. The platform is specifically designed to provide voice and SMS services. «After CBOSSprepaid installion, our customer base grew several times, as we managed to win low-value segment», — says Pavel Delyagin, head of NSS Software/Hardware Support. The perfect scalability offered by CBOSSprepaid platform allowed NNS to implement domestic and international roaming for prepaid clients last summer.

However, Sun Enterprise 6500 capabilities no longer suited the growing need for intelligent services and the platform supported only 500,000 subscribers. When the limit was exceeded, NSS started to look around for a new solution that would leverage its billing technology. Since server performance became an issue, processing of applications slowed down and the disk space was overrun, data warehousing was also put on the agenda.

Next Generation Server. The deployed server — Sun Enterprise 6500 — allows installing additional CPU boards. However, besides expenses for CPUs and CPU boards, license fees should be also considered. Eventually, buying a new server turns out to be more cost-effective than scaling up the old one. In January 2004, based on that calculation, NSS deployed SunFire 4800 server — a novelty from Sun Microsystems product line: 8 UltraSPRAC III CPUs with 1.2 GHz CPU and 32 Gb RAM run on Solaris 8 OS. The old server is still fit for operation, but it is now used for backup purposes only.

SunFire 4800 is built around symmetric multiprocessor architecture (SMP) that boasts the advantage of distributing transactions among independent dynamic domains without disrupting their operation (the technology was previously restricted to mainframe servers). The dynamic domains can be configured to run different operating systems. SMP system ranges from 2 to 12 UltraSPARC III CPUs (or UltraSPARC IV on SunFire 4900).
Equipment redundancy and dynamic reconfiguration, as well as OS updating, clustering and accelerated recovery in the hot swap mode open the door for highly available calculation centers with continuous operation. Besides, to make the most of the physical space, SunFire 4800 is installed in a special 19" rack.

Backup and recovery. One of the major concerns that modern telcos face is to keep data integrity. Business practice determines that corporate data should be stored on a single server and be highly available. This technology is quite easy to use, it optimizes backup on tape libraries (including those build around Sun StorEdge L25) and enhances security of the mission-critical data and, more important, data recovery.

Sun StorEdge L25 installed in NSS network consists of two DLT-8000 drivers with recording speed of 6 Мb/sec.; tape capacity of 40 Gb (regular recording) and 80 Gb (compressed data mode); backup capacity — 840 Gb.

Provisioning Systems. Long-term operation when the NSS subscriber base numbers millions of subscribers will require a more scalable, reliable and available platform. CBOSS (Convergent Business Operation Support System) solutions and numerous value-added products provide a great scope for network development. Here are some of them: CBOSSacc (Automatic Customer Care), CBOSSdss (Decision Support System), CBOSSics (Internet Customer Service System), CBOSSisp (Internet Sales Point), CBOSSsms, etc.