# External Storage System Overview

The External Storage System (ESS) is used to collect, store, and report billing information from the Enhanced Charging Service running on the ASR 5x00 chassis. This guide contains information on installing, configuring, and maintaining the ESS.

This chapter consists of the following topics:

- ESS Overview
- System Requirements

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.
Figure 1. ESS Architecture with ECS

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.

ESS Features and Functions

The ESS is a storage server logically connected with the ASR 5x00 and acts as an integrated network system.

The following are some of the important features of an 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 ESS provides the following functions:

- 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 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 5x00 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.

ESS System Recommendations for Stand-alone Deployment

This section identifies the minimum system requirements recommended for the the stand-alone deployment of the ESS application in 14.0 and later releases:

NEBS Requirements:

- OpenSSL must be installed
- Oracle’s Sun Netra™ X4270 M3 Server
  - 2 x Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 with 64GB RAM
  - DVD-RW drive
  - Two 100-240V AC (1+1) or two -48V DC or two -60V DC (1+1)
  - Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
- Sun StorageTek 2540 M2 SAS Array, Rack-Ready Controller Tray
  - 12 x 300 GB 15K RPM SAS drives
  - Two redundant AC power supplies
- Operating Environment:
  - Cisco MITG RHEL 5.5

Non-NEBS Requirements:

- Cisco UCS C210 M2 Rack Server
  - 2 x Intel Xeon X5675 processor with 64 GB DDR3 RAM
  - 300 GB 6Gb SAS 10K RPM SFF Hard Disk Drive
  - Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
  - Internal DVD-ROM drive
  - AC or DC power supplies depending on the application
- Sun StorageTek 2540 M2 SAS Array, Rack-Ready Controller Tray
  - 12 x 300 GB 15K RPM SAS drives
  - Two redundant AC power supplies
- Operating Environment:
  - Cisco MITG RHEL 5.5

IMPORTANT:

The number of discs recommended is based on the throughput of the network and data retention configuration. Please contact Cisco Advanced Service Team for data sizing, number of processors, and RAM size.

IMPORTANT:

The Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5 OS is a custom image that contains only those software packages required to support compatible Cisco MITG external software applications. Users must not install any other applications on servers running the Cisco MITG v5.5 OS. For detailed software compatibility information, refer to the Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5 OS Application Note.

This section identifies the minimum system requirements recommended for the the stand-alone deployment of the ESS application in 9.0 and earlier releases:

- 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 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
  - Intel x64 core 4 socket
- Operating Environment:
  - Sun Solaris 10

IMPORTANT:

For information on which server to be used for ESS application, contact your local sales representative.

ESS System Recommendations for Cluster Deployment

This section identifies the minimum system requirements recommended for the the cluster deployment of the ESS application in 14.0 and later releases:

NEBS Requirements:

- OpenSSL must be installed
- 2 x Oracle’s Sun Netra™ X4270 M3 Server
  - 2 x Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 with 64GB RAM
  - DVD-RW drive
  - Two 100-240V AC (1+1) or two -48V DC or two -60V DC (1+1)
  - Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
- Sun StorageTek 2540 M2 SAS Array, Rack-Ready Controller Tray
  - 12 x 300 GB 15K RPM SAS drives
  - Two redundant AC power supplies
- Veritas cluster version 5.1
- Operating Environment:
  - Cisco MITG RHEL 5.5

Non-NEBS Requirements:

- 2 x Cisco UCS C210 M2 Rack Server
  - 2 x Intel Xeon X5675 processor with 64 GB DDR3 RAM
  - 300GB 6Gb SAS 10K RPM SFF Hard Disk Drive
  - Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
  - Internal DVD-ROM drive
  - AC or DC power supplies depending on the application
- Veritas cluster version 5.1
- Sun StorageTek 2540 M2 SAS Array, Rack-Ready Controller Tray
  - 12 x 300 GB 15K RPM SAS drives
  - Two redundant AC power supplies
- Operating Environment:
  - Cisco MITG RHEL 5.5

IMPORTANT:

The number of discs recommended is based on the throughput of the network and data retention configuration. Please contact Cisco Advanced Service Team for data sizing, Number of processors, and RAM size.

IMPORTANT:

The Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5 OS is a custom image that contains only those software packages required to support compatible Cisco MITG external software applications. Users must not install any other applications on servers running the Cisco MITG v5.5 OS. For detailed software compatibility information, refer to the Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5 OS Application Note.

This section identifies the minimum system requirements recommended for the the cluster deployment of the ESS application in 9.0 and earlier releases:

- 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