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In service of the customer

To tackle the need for enterprise-wide availability and live reporting, Reliance Communications implemented GoldenGate's solutions, reports Vinita Gupta

Reliance Communications (RCOM) is an integrated telecommunications service provider with a customer base of over 55 million, including over 1.7 million individual overseas retail customers. RCOM’s corporate clientele includes 2,100 Indian and multinational corporations, and over 800 global, regional and domestic carriers.

RCOM has established a pan-India, next generation, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting best-of-class services spanning the entire communications value chain, covering over 20,000 towns and 450,000 villages. RCOM owns and operates the world’s largest next generation IP enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 175,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable systems in India, US, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.

RCOM’s objective is to achieve customer satisfaction by enhancing the productivity of the enterprises and individuals it serves. To achieve this, last year (2007) RCOM implemented three different GoldenGate solutions including Live Reporting, High Availability and Disaster Tolerance and Zero Downtime Migration.

Live Reporting

RCOM’s current Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system consists of:

• Call centers at Navi Mumbai and Chennai; more than 2,000 retail outlets all over India
• 500,000+ customers serviced per day by 10,000 users during peak hours
• 24x7 operations with online integration with other IT systems in RCOM

With the rapid increase in customers, RCOM had to augment its staff to handle customer service calls and requests. This resulted in challenges for the organization on its two primary business applications: the CRM system, which administers customer acquisition, customer care, service changes and profile changes; and the Operations Support System (OSS), a next generation provisioning system.

Firstly, the challenge with the OSS application meant that the company’s primary system was becoming overloaded with requests for various look-ups and business reports.

RCOM’s power requirement was going high and at the same time the business group that includes the marketing, finance, operational and other departments wanted to access the information in real-time as they wanted to have continuous access to the data and could not afford any downtime.

Before implementing GoldenGate, RCOM accessed the data from the information source system (for business intelligence), which was expensive, time consuming and heavily impacted the performance of the source system.

The initial need was to enable better reporting for all business users. Apart from the normal functions for which the CRM system was developed, various data extractions and reports are run in accordance with business needs.

Subhashish Biswas, Head IT Operations, RCOM said, “Before deploying the GoldenGate Live Reporting solution, the team at RCOM conducted a manual synch at the end of each business day, which took approximately 4-6 hours to complete and left employees with day old data from which to run reports. With GoldenGate, the delay is minimized and business reports are in-sync with the current real-time production data. Some online functionality like interactions and case creation for call centers are now routed to the target system, which has reduced the load on the CR M production server.”

RCOM currently uses GoldenGate to move transactional data to the secondary instance for management reporting. The GoldenGate live reporting solution had allowed RCOM to access the data in real-time and has even helped with data movement within the departments.

High Availability and Disaster Tolerance

Different technologies had been used to send the data to the secondary disaster recovery site. The amount of data that has to flow over a WAN to backup structured data (data stored in a database as opposed to MS office documents etc). WAN links do not have the kind of bandwidth that LAN connections do (2 Mbps typically vs. 1 Gbps on a Gigabit LAN).

If all the data has to be sent to the target (DR site), then there is a need for a much bigger WAN pipe and so instead of taking this approach, the GoldenGate solution transfers only fresh or changed data in real-time thereby avoiding sending large batches of data over the network. GoldenGate’s capture module resides at the source database system and delivery module at the target system. This technology can be used for both the LAN and WAN network. The technology is specific to databases which, in any large company, would form a big chunk of the data flowing on the WAN.

Biswas, said, “For every 15 minutes we had around 1GB of archived material to transfer on the Web site and our reporting was taking time resulting in a need to upgrade our servers. However, if the input and output (I/O) bottleneck is high, upgrading servers will not work. So we decided to decrease the (I/O) and replicate the data from the source to the target site. In the simple replication, locks are found which will degrade the file and for this reason we did not go for simple replication.”

The GoldenGate solution collects the data lock files, converts and transfers it to the archive. So instead of transferring 200 GB of data, Biswas and his team at RCOM transfers the additional or changed data. The volume of data transactions is high and hence GoldenGate does not connect to the database, but to the archive log file. In this way, the GoldenGate solution’s footprint on the source system is tiny and the impact is almost negligible.

The OSS system has terabytes of data, which is offloaded for reporting and analysis to support various business users throughout the organization. Additionally, the secondary system now also serves as a live standby so that in the case of a disaster or system outage, all users point to the secondary database for continuous access to the OSS application.

“With GoldenGate, RCOM was able to capture all of the changed data transactions from the primary Oracle 9i database and move them to a secondary server dedicated for reporting. Hence, whenever we need to move data, the team here simply says let’s GoldenGate it,” said Biswas.

Zero Downtime Migration

RCOM was moving to a new system. In a typical migration process, the company has to copy the data, shutdown the old system and import it to the new system. In

the traditional approach, an outage might occur and disrupt the continuous operations of the application and therefore the business. So for this reason, RCOM decided to implement the GoldenGate Zero Downtime Migration solution, whereby the migration was conducted using the same real-time transactional data management technology allowing RCOM to migrate from the old system to new without any downtime.

Growing business needs, increased transactional volume, need of real-time reporting and queries and 24x7 availability of the information have led RCOM to implement all the above mentioned GoldenGate’s solutions.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com