ESS Overview
IMPORTANT:
The ESS is not a part
of the ASR5x00 platform or the Enhanced Charging Service (ECS) in-line
service. It is an external server.
IMPORTANT:
For information on
compatibility between ESS and StarOS releases, contact your Cisco account
representative.
On the ASR 5x00 chassis,
the CDR subsystem provides 512 MB of volatile memory on the packet
processing card RAM on the ASR 5000 and the data processing card
RAM on the ASR 5500 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 ESS, and ESS forwards these files to the
required destinations. If HDD is not configured on the platform,
ESS pulls the files from the system and forwards them to the destinations.
The 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 ESS 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.
IMPORTANT:
The procedures in
this guide assume that you have already configured your chassis
with ECS as described in the Enhanced
Charging Services Administration Guide.
The following figure
shows a typical organization of ESS and billing system with chassis having
a AAA server.
The system running
with ECS stores xDR files on an ESS and billing system collects
the files from the 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.
ESS also pushes xDR
files to external applications for post-processing, reporting, subscriber profiling,
and trend analysis.