External Storage System Overview

External Storage System Overview
 
 
 
An External Storage System (ESS) is used to collect, store, and report billing information from the Enhanced Charging Service running on the ASR 5000 platform on short term and long term storage basis. This guide contains instructions for implementing and maintaining the Local, short-term External Storage Server (L-ESS) and Remote, long-term External Storage Server (R-ESS).
Important: The External Storage System is not a part of the Enhanced Charging Service (ECS) and must be purchased separately. To purchase ESS, contact your designated sales or service representative.
Important: The procedures in this guide assume that you have installed and configured your chassis including the ECS installation and configuration as described in the Enhanced Charging Services Administration Guide.
 
Overview
 
The CDR subsystem, provides 512 MB of volatile memory on the packet processing card RAM to store accounting information. This on-board memory is intended as a short-term buffer for accounting information so that billing systems can periodically retrieve the buffered information for bill generation purposes. However if network outages or other failures cause billing systems to lose contact with the system, it is possible that the CDR subsystem storage area can be filled with non-retrieved accounting information. When the storage is filled the CDR subsystem starts deleting the oldest files to make sure that there is room for new billing files and non-retrieved accounting information can be lost. Using an external storage server with a large storage volume in close proximity to the chassis ensures room for storing a large amount of billing data that is not lost by any failure.
The ESS has the capability of simultaneously fetching any types of files from one or more chassis. That is, it can fetch CDR, EDR, NBR, UDR file, etc.
In case of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) support on the chassis, the platform has the capability to push the EDR/NBR/UDR files to L-ESS, and then L-ESS forwards these files to the required destinations. If HDD is not configured on the platform, L-ESS pulls the files from the system and forwards them to the destinations.
The External Storage System (ESS) is designed to be used as a safe storage area. A mediation or billing server within your network must be configured to collect accounting records from the ESS once it retrieves them.
The External Storage System supports a high level of redundancy for secure charging and billing information for post-processing of CDRs. This system can store charging data of up to 30 days.
This guide discusses the following topics on External Storage System:
The following figure shows a typical organization of External Storage System including L-ESS, R-ESS, and billing system with chassis having a AAA server.
ESS architecture with ECS
The system running with ECS stores EDR/NBR/UDR files on an L-ESS and billing system collects the files from the L-ESS, and correlates them with the AAA accounting messages using either 3GPP2-Correlation-IDs on a PDSN system or Charging IDs on a GGSN system.
L-ESS also pushes EDR/NBR/UDR files to R-ESS for long-term storage of CDRs. Data on the R-ESS can be used for post-processing, reporting, subscriber profiling, and trend analysis.
 
Local, Short-Term External Storage System
The Local, short-term storage system (L-ESS) is a storage server logically connected with the ASR 5000 and acts as an integrated network system.
The following are the requirements for the deployment of L-ESS:
In general L-ESS provides the following functionalities:
 
Remote, Long-Term External Storage System
The remote, long-term storage component (R-ESS) is responsible for the storage of EDR/NBR/UDR files pushed from one or more L-ESS. The L-ESS pushes these files to R-ESS at pre-configured intervals using SFTP. For long term planning R-ESS provides long-term storage of files up to 30 days. Records provided by R-ESS can be utilized for network planning, subscriber usage profiling analysis or marketing strategies.
The following are the requirements for the deployment of R-ESS:
In general R-ESS provides the following functionalities:
 
System Requirements
 
The requirements described in this section must be met in order to ensure proper operation of the ESS system.
 
ASR 5000 System Requirements
The following configurations must be implemented, as described in Configuring Enhanced Charging Services chapter of the Enhanced Charging Services Administration Guide:
 
ESS System Requirements
 
Important: System requirement recommendation is dependent of different parameters including CDR generation, compression, deployment scenario, etc. Contact your sales representative for system requirements specific to your ESS deployment.
 
Minimum System Recommendations for Stand-alone Deployment of L-ESS and R-ESS
 
Important: It is recommended that you have separate interfaces (in IPMP) for mediation device and chassis. Also, for given IPMP, the two interfaces should be on different cards.
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Important: For information on which server to be used for L-ESS application, contact your local sales representative.
 
Minimum System Recommendations for Cluster Deployment of L-ESS
Important: It is recommended that you have separate interfaces (in IPMP) for mediation device and chassis. Also, for given IPMP, the two interfaces should be on different cards.
 
Recommendations for R-ESS Reporting System Client (Optional)
 
Important: The R-ESS GUI (Graphical User Interface) screens may experience misalignment if viewed with a browser other than Internet Explorer.
Important: Generating reports for multiple days with large amounts of data may take long time and cause Internet Explorer to time out. To avoid Internet Explorer issues, it is recommended to run the internet_settings.reg file (in the <InstallScripts> directory) on the workstation running the GUI client. This script sets the IE timeout to max (~1193 hours). However, if the report takes longer than this max time, the “page not found” error will occur.
Important: The minimum system requirements described in this section are for stand-alone deployment. For Cluster ready hardware contact your technical representative for more information.
 

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