IBM benchmark highlights Comptel’s ability to protect Communications Service Providers against the growing mediation and charging requirements that ‘lifestyle’ services demand

Comptel Corporation (OMX Helsinki: CTL1V), the leading vendor of dynamic Operations Support System (OSS) software, today announced the results of an extensive scalability and performance benchmarking study undertaken in conjunction with IBM.

The study demonstrates the unique capability of the newest versions of Comptel’s Convergent Mediation and Charging Solutions to address the scalability issue that ‘lifestyle’ services present for Communication Service Providers (CSPs). As these content and bandwidth-heavy lifestyle services are packaged and billed to end-customers in increasingly diverse ways, service providers will require systems that are able to scale to the corresponding exponential increase in mediation and charging support within OSS systems.

“Lifestyle services require CSPs to improve their real-time control and management of services as customers will expect more flexibility in the way these services are packaged together and charged to them.” said Simo Sääskilahti, Comptel SVP Products and Solutions. “In a service provider’s production environment, this translates into a dramatic increase in the number of mediation and charging events that the OSS must be able to handle.”

In this benchmarking exercise, Comptel was able to achieve near linear scaling to over 1.9 billion events per hour on a single IBM Power 595 server with a 64-way POWER6 microprocessor.

“Scalability of this magnitude is critical to meeting the dynamic needs of tier-one service providers and those looking to consolidate multiple billing back-office components into a convergent platform,” continued Sääskilahti. “Comptel is comfortable to deliver our solutions on IBM technology for our largest customers, some quickly approaching 100 million subscribers.”

“The combination of Comptel’s Convergent Mediation and Charging software and the IBM technology is a great cost effective option for customers that require the highest levels of performance and scalability,” said Pierre Perdaems, IBM Telecommunication Servers – EMEA CTO. “By achieving nearly two billion events per hour with Comptel Convergent Mediation and Charging, the IBM Power series server family has again demonstrated why it is proving to be the architecture of choice for CSPs worldwide.”

Today, Comptel has 16 customers on Power series servers supporting over 200 million subscribers, including Airtel, DTAC, Idea Cellular, Telefónica Móviles Argentina and Vodafone Essar. IBM Power series servers are the servers of choice for tier one service providers, with Power 6 servers providing PowerVM – IBM’s industry-leading virtualisation technology – to allow optimal flexibility, server consolidation and cost reduction.

Benchmark Details
* Conducted at IBM Telecommunications Infrastructure Center for BSS in Montpellier France, the benchmark included various workloads such as offline streams, online streams, charging, rating, and customer balance management activities using a variety of conditions modeled after real-life communications service providers. Several joint customers provided validated test scenarios.

* Convergent scenarios covered modeled conditions equal to 1.5 billion subscribers in a developing economy prepaid/postpaid business model. Specific test scenarios for GGSNs and other network components generating high record volumes requiring complex stream aggregation were defined and tested by IBM Global Services.

* The results verified Comptel Convergent Mediation Solution 6.1 and Comptel Charging Solution 6.1 core components’ near linear scalability utilising in-memory data storage. Memory usage correlates to core functionalities, such as aggregation, correlation, duplicate checking, and rating which dynamically drives how many parallel sessions to hold against the data store.

* The benchmark tested Comptel’s solutions running on a single IBM POWER6 processor-based Power 595 server, with IBM AIX version 6.1 operating system and IBM PowerVM virtualisation technology, hosted by an IBM DS8300 storage subsystem.

Additionally, Comptel also ported Comptel Convergent Mediation Solution 6.1 and Comptel Charging Solution 6.1 to support IBM solidDB in-memory database and IBM BladeCenter, for more performance, scalability, and reliability options required for varying emerging and Greenfield market conditions. Comptel plans to make the Comptel Convergent Mediation and Charging Solutions generally available leveraging the high performance of IBM solidDB in-memory database. Comptel Charging Solution 6.1 is also being integrated by IBM into Aritel applying IBM SOA best practices.

About Comptel Corporation
Comptel provides Comptel Dynamic OSS solutions, enabling telecom service providers to deliver services flexibly and charge them effectively. Comptel’s expertise in inventory, provisioning and activation, mediation and charging empowers service providers to focus on delivering the innovative services. Comptel has provided solutions to 280 customers with 800 million subscribers in 85 countries. Net sales were EUR 85 million in 2008. The Group has about 600 employees in 18 countries. http://www.comptel.com