About Reliance Communications: Reliance Communications Limited founded by the late Shri. Dhirubhai H Ambani (1932- 2002) is the flagship company of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Rated among “Asia’s Top 5 Most Valuable Telecom Companies”, Reliance Communications is India’s foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider. The company, with a customer base of over 40 million including over 1.3 million individual overseas retail customers, ranks among the Top 10 Asian Telecom companies by number of customers. Reliance Communications’ corporate clientele includes 1850 Indian and multinational corporations, and over 200 global carriers.

Reliance Communications Case Study
February 2008 Background
Reliance Communications is the second largest telecommunications company in India. The company is the telecommunications arm of Reliance Group, which is the largest private sector company in India. In 2007, the company’s subscriber base exceeded 40 million and was growing at an annual growth rate of 50% per year. The company was quickly adding features and services to its traditional wired-line, pre-paid mobile, and post-paid mobile offerings to meet customer demand and increase market share in a highly competitive business environment.

Business Challenge

The increase in demand for Reliance’s services was producing explosive growth in the systems and infrastructure required to operate the business. The need to provide accurate, timely analytics to all parts of the business was becoming more acute. One area of the company that required rapid delivery of relevant analysis was Reliance’s Law Enforcement Department. As is the case in many countries around the globe, India’s government requires telecommunications companies to produce detailed phone records upon request for specific subscribers to improve national security and reduce crime. Reliance’s rapid growth, coupled with the inability of traditional database systems to scale and perform, was quickly reducing the company’s ability to deliver on these requests. Turning a request for records around took multiple days. Even loading a day’s worth of data into the system was taking on the order of 2 to 3 hours. To maintain compliance and deliver results, Reliance needed a breakthrough solution.

Solutions

Reliance turned to Greenplum and the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance to solve its largescale data challenges. The company selected the S1004 model of the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance. The S1004 integrates Greenplum Database with 4 Sunfire X4500 systems as well as a Sunfire X4200 system. All of the systems run Solaris, which includes ZFS, Sun’s revolutionary file system.

In aggregate, the systems provide 20 CPU cores driving 192 SATA disk drives and 40 terabytes of usable database capacity. As a result of deploying the S1004, the time required to turn around a request for detailed call records shrank by over 80 percent, from multiple days to a few hours. In addition to the company’s issues with information retrieval, the inability to load data into the data warehouse quickly enough was becoming increasingly problematic. Compared to Reliance’s previous database system, the Greenplum system reduced the average time to load a day’s worth of data by over 90 percent, from 2 hours to under 10 minutes. Deploying the Greenplum solution improved response times and mitigated Reliance’s risk of non-compliance.

Reliance Communications has established a panIndia, next generation, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting best-of-class services spanning the entire infocomm value chain, covering over 14,000 towns and 400,000 villages. Reliance Communications owns and operates the world’s largest next generation IP enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 165,000 kilometers of fibre optic cable systems in India, USA, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.

Opting for More of a Good Thing: System Expansion

The system delivered so much value in such a short period of time that Reliance decided to expand the system to include another critically important data set. This time, Reliance chose to add call detail records (CDRs) from its interconnect traffic. These records represent all of the calls that traverse the Reliance Network and one or more other networks to link initiating subscribers to receiving subscribers. Interconnect CDRs are used to monitor SLAs and to perform billing among coexistent telco carriers on the broader network. In an industry marked by rapid growth and new market entrants, the scale and complexity of Interconnect data had become too much for the traditional database technology that Reliance had used in the past. Taking advantage of Greenplum’s ability to scale horizontally, Reliance simply added two X4500 systems to the existing S1004, to construct what is effectively an S1006 appliance. Today, the system supports 60 terabytes of usable capacity and 200 SATA drives with 28 CPU cores. Reliance’s two primary data sets represent over 28 terabytes of actual data, growing at a pace of 1 terabyte per week.

Summary

Reliance Telco chose Greenplum Database and the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance as the clear solution to its large-scale data challenges. The query and loading speed of the solution make it possible for Reliance to deliver unprecedented responsiveness in an environment characterized by rapid data growth and increasing user demand. In the first few months of production use, this growing telecommunications company has already benefited from Greenplum’s horizontal scalability by increasing the scale of the solution by 50%. As Reliance continues to thrive with new services and subscribers, the company increasingly looks to Greenplum and the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance to solve its toughest data problems.

Contact
Greenplum 1900 S. Norfolk Drive, Suite 224 San Mateo, CA 94403 United States +1 650 286 8012 (ph) +1 650 286 8010 (fax)