Ocient DRDS Empowers Large Telco to Meet Stringent New SLAs
TL;DR: A large telco satisfies stringent compliance SLAs with the Ocient Data Retention and Disclosure System
When a large telecommunications company (telco) found itself unable to meet the new service level agreements (SLAs) its governing body had set for the lawful disclosure of its network metadata, its technical and legal teams began seeking a data warehousing, retention, and analysis solution that could collect, store, and analyze the continuous stream of data within the tight parameters of the government intelligence agencies’ SLAs.
Ideally, the solution would begin with an initial, upfront capital expenditure (CapEx), followed by three years of operations expenses (OpEx) in the form of ongoing services. This budgetary model, along with local data security regulations, meant the telco would need an on-premises solution.
The telco tested several data warehouse platforms and other potential solutions, but nothing the team tried could deliver the performance the new SLAs required at a realistic price.
When the telco team learned about the Ocient Data Retention and Disclosure System (DRDS), they were hopeful that this end-to-end offering could help them close the gap on their SLAs. The Ocient DRDS is fully customizable, with separate modules for data collection, integration, and disclosure via API or a custom-built portal. Ocient delivered all the modules for this customer, partnering with a probe vendor to facilitate data collection.
A Proven Solution
Early in the engagement, the Ocient Customer Solutions and Workload Services team spent several weeks gathering requirements and developing a deep understanding of the telco’s existing environment. The Ocient team went on to document the business, financial, and technical advantages Ocient could offer, showcasing the Ocient platform’s ability to ingest massive amounts of streaming data, store it efficiently, and deliver query results within very tight timelines – all at a low, predictable price.
A technical proof of concept followed, during which the Ocient Customer Solutions and Workload Services team tapped into their years of experience to customize the Ocient DRDS offering, developing an efficient and streamlined solution that could meet the telco’s needs without driving up costs or requiring additional personnel.
Streamlined Data Sourcing
Ocient started by collecting and aggregating the telco’s network metadata. In some cases, this step involves tapping directly into a telco’s systems of record, but for this customer, Ocient partnered with the telco’s preferred probe vendor to move the metadata off the network without impacting operations.
Next, the data was loaded into the Ocient DRDS via a custom pipeline that leverages Ocient’s native ELT and ETL capabilities to ensure efficiency and accuracy. The Ocient solution’s ability to handle very large volumes of streaming data stood out to the telco, which averages more than 275 billion network flows per day, and early testing proved that Ocient could make the data queryable in a matter of a few minutes, significantly below the 15-minute limit set by the SLAs. Ocient’s elegant, easy-to-operate ELT solution convinced the telco that Ocient would succeed where so many other vendors had failed.
Rapid Responses to Complex Queries
With the data streaming efficiently into the Ocient system, the team turned to its next challenge: enabling the telco to run thousands of queries concurrently, obtaining results in seconds to minutes. Several of the Ocient system’s technological innovations made this possible, including:
- Ocient’s Megalane™, which saturates the drives to enable an extreme number of tasks in parallel,
- Sophisticated workload management capabilities, which ensure that urgent queries are prioritized without compromising less urgent tasks,
- A full set of indexes, including TimeKey® clustering, n-gram, and hash, which accelerate querying across the board, delivering results to the telco in near-real time.
Accessible, High-Volume Storage
SLAs for data retention differ among regions, countries, and telcos. This customer was required to store approximately 25 PB of uncompressed data for a full year. The telco’s SLAs also state that this historical data must be available for query at all times.
The Ocient solution met these requirements easily thanks to several system features, including Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture® (CASA), which locates the storage and compute layers in the same physical space, eliminating the need to access data over a network connection, which can create bottlenecks and cause latency. Ocient’s Zero Copy Reliability™ also eases storage concerns by removing the need to replicate data for reliability, while sophisticated compression strategies decrease the total volume of data to be stored. Together, these advances enable Ocient to provide ample storage in a footprint that’s up to 80% smaller than other solutions require.
Flexible Disclosure Fulfillment
With the data loaded, analyzed, and stored efficiently in the Ocient system, the telco needed to disclose query results to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The DRDS Disclosure API module automates the processing of disclosure requests and retrieval of results. The Ocient team leveraged the Disclosure API to create a seamless interface with intelligence agencies that needed automated disclosure processing with specific requirements.
Disclosing to another agency required the Ocient team to leverage the DRDS Disclosure Portal module, which enables the telco’s disclosure support team to communicate query results to the agency safely and efficiently.
On Premises, Under Control
Due to local laws and legislation, the solution had to be installed in the telco’s on-premises data center. Fortunately, the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse™ and Ocient DRDS are built for exceptional performance regardless of where they are deployed: on premises, on public cloud platforms like AWS and GCP, or on the OcientCloud®.
In this case, the Ocient team procured new hardware for the customer’s data center, configured it, and used it to deploy the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse and DRDS. The entire solution, including storage capacity for a year’s worth of data, fits on a single rack in the customer’s data center, delivering critical new capabilities in an incredibly efficient footprint that reduces energy costs and helps the telco meet its carbon neutrality goals.
The Ocient solution also delivers outstanding data security via the following:
- All disks are self-encrypting drives providing data-at-rest encryption
- Encryption keys can be integrated with the telco’s key management system using the Key Management Interoperability Protocol
- Intra-database network communication is in an air-gapped environment within the telco’s secure data center
- Client/application to Ocient database communication is encrypted via TLS/SSL
- Both user and application access can be configured to use SSO via OpenID Connect (OIDC)
- Firewall rules restrict which hosts can access the database
- All data written is immutable and insert only. Ocient can disable deletes via permissions or a flag that completely disables deletes from the deployment
- If needed, Ocient can write a copy of the data to the customer’s on-prem immutable data store, offering restricted access to a few telco employees
- Ocient’s Digital Media Retention with hardware support ensures no disks will ever leave the telco’s data center.
Meeting SLAs with Ease
When the solution went live, Ocient Management Services was on hand to provide remote monitoring and 24×7 support for critical issues. This optional service guarantees that the telco’s new lawful disclosure solution delivers the performance and reliability the telco needs to meet its SLAs.
As the way we communicate continues to evolve, telcos and other communication services providers (CSPs) can expect to grapple with increasingly large volumes of network metadata like ICR (Internet Connect Records), CDR (Call Detail Records), TCDR (TrueCall Data Records or location specific data) and IPDR (IP Data records). Expectations from law enforcement and governing bodies around the disclosure of this data will continue to evolve, too, with increasingly hard-hitting consequences for failure to comply with SLAs.
For this telco, compliance is no longer an out-of-reach challenge. With the Ocient Data Retention and Disclosure System fully installed in their on-premises data center, they can meet their SLAs with ease, and their network metadata now resides in a system that is secure, reliable, and easy to maintain.
To learn more about the Ocient Data Retention and Disclosure System, download the brief or contact our sales team.
Watch a short explainer video on the Ocient Data Retention and Disclosure System.