Telecom Switches- No One Notices

The Challenges

• A data warehousing application severely constrained by server performance and scalability.
• A complex and customised 16-terabyte Oracle database that records and analyses Telecom’s customer data.
• A mission-critical customer management system requiring a hardware upgrade to improve performance and cater for business growth.
• A business requirement for minimal downtime.

Telecom NZ faced a challenge. Telecom NZ needed to migrate its core marketing data warehouse application, based on a 16-terabyte Oracle database, from its existing Sun platform to the IBM Power platform – all within budget and negligible downtime.

What’s more, to get the most from the investment, the new hardware would also need to host its mission-critical Integrated Customer Management System (ICMS) which was used by up to 3000 staff to record day-to-day transactions with their millions of customers.

The Solution

Telecom NZ invested in two Power 595 enterprise-class servers - one for production and the second for disaster recovery. Telecom NZ engaged IBM to not only manage the migration from Sun hardware to the Power 595 environment, but at the same time upgrade the underlying database from Oracle 9i to Oracle 11g. This was accomplished using the IBM XenoBridge migration tool that concurrently migrated the customer information from Sun to IBM, and also facilitated an Oracle 9i to Oracle
11g upgrade, with no interruption to Telecom’s business.

As a result, the performance of the data warehouse application has increased 10-fold, and Oracle licensing and support costs have been reduced to one fifth.

“They’ll be able to execute in hours - or sometimes minutes- queries that used to take days.” Johnston says. That will allow them, for example, to correlate calling patterns in different geographic locations on the company’s new XT mobile network with other sources of information in close to real time,"– Garry Johnston, Head of Technical Services, Telecom’s Technology Transformation and Shared Services unit.

IBM’s Role

• Mitigate the overall migration risk: Facilitate the migration of Telecom’s data warehouse application from a Sun platform to the Power 595 machine and optimising the investment in this critical application.
• Deliver a robust scalable platform capable of growth: Supply Power 595 enterprise-class servers to run Telecom’s mission-critical ICMS application, which has about 3000 simultaneous users.
• Support an Oracle 9i to 11g upgrade: As part of the database migration from Sun Solaris to IBM AIX the opportunity was provided to also upgrade the application’s underlying database from Oracle 9i to Oracle 11g.
• Minimal project timeframe: The database migration project was undertaken over about four months using IBM’s XenoBridge tool, which allows the application to remain in production during the porting process.

Key Business Benefits

• Growth: p595 hardware provides a solid base for the anticipated remaining four years of ICMS’ life and future workload consolidation as well.
• Flexibility: p595 will host new applications that progressively replace ICMS’s functionality running on any of the AIX, iOS or Linux operating systems and a platform for competitive workload.
• Performance: Industry leading performance per core will boost the data warehouse performance by a factor of 10, while also cutting Oracle database support fees by 80 percent.
• Cost Savings: Standard p595 software utilities replace a number of third-party tools needed to run on the Sun platform, at no additional charge.
• Energy Management: p595’s virtualisation and power management features through Active Energy Manager mean significant data centre cost savings.
• Return On Investment: The project promises a return on investment in less than six months.

“There’s rightly a lot of interest in this platform because it’s a core source of operational data for the business– it was out of the comfort zone of many individuals.”. Garry Johnston, Head of Technical Services, Telecom’s Technology Transformation and Shared Services unit.

When your business has millions of account holders, many with histories going back decades, you don’t trifle with customer information. But when that information is contained in a database that is a couple of versions behind the times, it’s a fair bet that the business is not getting all the intelligence it could from the data. Time, then, to consider an upgrade.

However, for Telecom New Zealand, bringing its 16-terabyte Oracle 9i-based data warehouse database into the present day, by migrating it to Oracle 11g, was a daunting prospect.

There was the sheer size of the database - 16TB occupies roughly 20,000 CDs; there were the scores of interfaces between the data warehouse and other Telecom systems; and there was the perceived risk of wanting to move the application from Sun to IBM hardware - in other words, to a new operating system.

It’s fair to say, according to Garry Johnston, technology services head within the telco’s technology and shared services unit, that the upgrade and migration were viewed somewhat nervously.

“There’s rightly a lot of interest in this platform because it’s a core source of operational data for the business, so for us to shift platforms was out of the comfort zone of many individuals.” Johnston says.

But in the end, the migration itself has gone painlessly, and there have been big gains from the project. For one thing, shifting from a 24-processor Sun machine to only five processors on a new IBM Power 595 system will greatly reduce Oracle software support fees.

For another, the much greater performance of the Power 595 system - up to 10 times faster - plus Oracle 11g’s more advanced tools than Oracle 9i, mean Telecom marketers can now analyse customer data in ways they couldn’t previously contemplate.

“They’ll be able to execute in hours - or sometimes minutes - queries that used to take days.” Johnston says. That will allow them, for example, to correlate calling patterns in different geographic locations on the company’s new XT mobile network with other sources of information in close to real time.

“There’s rightly a lot of interest in this platform because it’s a core source of operational data for the business – it was out of the comfort zone of many individuals,"– Garry Johnston, Head of Technical Services, Telecom’s Technology Transformation and Shared Services unit.

Gains aside, the project has a couple of other fascinating features. The porting from Sun’s Solaris operating system to IBM AIX, and Oracle 9i to 11g, was undertaken by IBM in collaboration with Telecom NZ.

It was accomplished using XenoBridge, an IBM owned migration tool designed to migrate data from one platform to another without any business downtime.

“IBM has more than ably come to the party with the individual who has done this work and by giving 100 percent backing that it would do the business.” Johnston says.

Both long term support of ICMS and the data warehouse migration project were key drivers for buying the new Power System p595. ICMS, the telco’s mission-critical customer billing application, is gradually being phased out, with different parts of the system being replaced by discrete applications, that are also being consolidated on the Power 595 machine.

The enterprise-class system, which is mirrored by a second disaster recovery machine, has numerous software utility and data centre efficiency benefits, Johnston says. They allow Telecom to dispense with a number of third-party software add-on products, and will automatically adjust data centre electricity consumption according to demand.

“Apart from one extra we’ve gone for a standard stack of IBM products, from the operating system through to the storage, so that again has removed several costs.” Johnston says.

“The System 595 will provide us with the ability to consolidate a lot of workload into a single chassis over time.” Remarkably, he expects the whole project to pay for itself within roughly six months. “It’s a great investment,” Johnston says.