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).

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 xDRs like 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 xDR 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. For information on the push functionality and its configuration, refer to the xDR File Push Functionality appendix.

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 xDRs. This system can store charging data of up to 30 days.

This guide discusses the following topics on External Storage System:

 

•	Storage System Components:

•	Local, short-term external storage server (L-ESS)

The following figure shows a typical organization of External Storage System including L-ESS and billing system with chassis having a AAA server.

 

ESS Architecture with ECS

The system running with ECS stores xDR 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 xDR files to external applications 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:

 

•	High speed dedicated redundant connections to chassis to pull xDR files.

•	High-speed dedicated and redundant connection with billing system to transfer xDR files.

•	Different management addresses than the management addresses of the chassis and billing system.

•	Management interface with support of multiple VLANs.

•	Redundancy support with two or more geographically co-located or isolated chassis to pull xDRs.

In general L-ESS provides the following functionalities:

 

•	Stores copy of records pulled from chassis.

•	Supports storage of up to 7 days worth of records.

•	Supports storage capacity of carrier-class redundant.

•	Provides a means of limiting the amount of bandwidth, in term of kbps, used for the file transfer between chassis and L-ESS.

•	Provides a means of archiving/compression of the pulled xDR files for the purpose of extending the storage capacity.

•	Provides xDR files to the billing system.

 

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:

•	ECS must be configured for generating billing records.

•	An administrator or config-administrator account that is enabled for FTP must be configured.

•	SSH keys must be generated.

•	The SFTP subsystem must be enabled.

 

ESS System Requirements

Important: System requirement recommendation is dependent of different parameters including xDR 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

 

•	OpenSSL must be installed

•	Sun Microsystems Netra™ T5220 server

•	1 x 1.2GHz 8 core UltraSPARC T2 processor with 8GB RAM

•	2 x 146GB SAS hard drives

•	Internal CDROM drive

•	AC or DC power supplies depending on your application

•	PCI-based video card or Keyboard-Video-Mouse (KVM) card (optional)

•	Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces

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.

•	Operating Environment:

•	Sun Solaris 9 with Solaris Patch dated January 25, 2005

•	Sun Solaris 10 with Solaris Patch number 137137-09 dated on or after July 16, 2007 to Nov 2008.

•	PSMON (installed through ESS installation script)

•	Perl 5.8.5 (installed through ESS installation script)

- or -

•	Sun Microsystems Netra™ X4450 server for L-ESS

•	Quad-Core Intel Xeon E7340 (2x4MB L2, 2.40 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)

•

32 GB RAM

•	12 x 300 GB 10000 RPM mirrored SAS disks

•	Four 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, 2 PCI-X, 8 PCIe

•	4 redundant AC power supplies

•	INtelx64 core 4 socket

•	Operating Environment:

•	Sun Solaris 10

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

 

•	Sun Microsystems Netra™ T5220 server

•	1 x 1.2GHz 4 core UltraSPARC T2 processor with 8GB RAM

•	2 x 146GB SAS hard drives

•	Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces

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.

•	Internal CDROM drive

•	AC or DC power supplies depending on your application

•	Fiber channel (FC) based Common Storage System for Servers (Sun Storage Tek 2540)

•	PCI Dual FC 4GB HBA

•	Dual RAID Controllers

•	5 x 300GB 15K drives

•	AC or DC power supplies depending upon your application

 

Cisco Systems Inc.

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