The Customer
TOMIA is the leading provider of transformative connectivity solutions to service providers worldwide. Its innovative offering enables them to maximize subscriber profitability from roaming and interconnect, optimize wholesale agreements, prevent fraud in real time, and derive benefits from advanced telecoms technologies such as VoLTE, NFV, and 5G. TOMIA serves over 450 CSPs including 30 tier-1 and 17 of the industry’s largest groups.
The Opportunity
TOMIA’s Production and Cloud team worked with dbSeer to solve three primary pain points for their telecom customer.
The first issue was performance. Their customer consistently experienced performance issues due to hardware issues that TOMIA didn’t have the ability to address. The customer had a hybrid solution, with some of their data on-premises and the rest in a private cloud. Due to the nature of this private cloud, TOMIA had no visibility of the underlying infrastructure and therefore was not able to fix issues as they arose. The limitations of this cloud prevented TOMIA from providing a positive user experience.
The second point that TOMIA needed to address was scalability. While the TOMIA Solution is capable of scaling, their customer couldn’t scale at all – they were constrained by their onpremises data center and limits to their CPUs. They desired a solution that would allow them to scale up or down without worrying about the fixed costs and time associated with adding new hardware.
The last issue was disaster recovery. All of their customer’s backups and data were stored in a single data center, which posed a great risk if a disaster was to occur. Finding a remedy to this was essential.
The Solutions
TOMIA decided that the only solution was to migrate their customer to the virtual public cloud. TOMIA evaluated multiple cloud vendors and came to the decision that AWS was the best option. This decision was based on AWS’s market leadership, combined with TOMIA’s experience with AWS and vast knowledge of its many capabilities. Additionally, it was the cheapest option. Using AWS solutions and dbSeer’s consulting services, TOMIA was able to solve all three of the customer’s pain points.
TOMIA addressed the performance issue by using Amazon EC2 Instances that provide secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 is backed-up by NVME drives that provide better throughput. With AWS, TOMIA had complete control of their customer’s computing environment, which allowed them to resolve any issues – something impossible with the private cloud. TOMIA also used optimized Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for some of the instances, which is a solution that AWS created when they recognized the need for smaller instance sizes to drive higher performance. The majority of application storage needs are short, intense periods of high I/O with long periods of idle time. Optimized EBS volumes allowed TOMIA’s customer to handle unplanned spikes in demand with zero impact to their application’s performance.
The data center was no longer a viable option for TOMIA’s rapidly-expanding telecom customer, they needed the scalability of the AWS Cloud. With Amazon EC2 instances, TOMIA can now obtain and boot new server instances in minutes, making scaling up resources and down very easy as requirements change. This also resulted in reduced costs, because with Amazon EC2, you only pay for the capacity that you use.
Due to security reasons reliance of other systems to this platform, TOMIA needed to use the same IP addresses as their telecom customer. Changing IP addresses wasn’t an option due to the number of interfaces that worked with the platform. To solve the networking constraint, TOMIA used Amazon’s Virtual Private Network (VPN). They used their customer’s natural backbone to provide internet services and put the VPN on top of it. With this solution, TOMIA could map their IPs to AWS and use their original IP range over a VPN. In order to go live, TOMIA first created a system for testing. After the testing, they refreshed the data over the weekend, then established the secure VPN tunnel within one hour. Amazon VPN provided TOMIA with an effortless solution to address all of their customer’s security concerns.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provided the perfect solution for storage and disaster recovery. S3 is a repository for Internet data that allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data from any time from within Amazon EC2 or anywhere on the web. It also stores data objects in multiple Availability Zones. Unlike their customer’s previous set-up, with AWS, data centers are isolated and highly-available. If one Availability Zone goes out within a region, there’s no need for concern because the other Availability Zone in the region will still have snapshots of the data volumes. This service is included for all AWS customers without any additional cost.
The Results
Before moving to the AWS Cloud, TOMIA’s telecom customer had many hardware and infrastructure issues with their platform. Since moving to the AWS Cloud, there have been no issues with performance. Critical jobs now are considerably faster – the average running time for critical jobs improved by 20% after migrating to the AWS Cloud. The migration as a whole was very low-effort and time-saving because their customer was able to change systems without changing IPs.
The project took five months from start to finish: one month of planning, two months for staging, testing, and validation, and two months of parallel production run. After that, there was the final migration that took place over 24 hours. To further demonstrate the success of this project, the number of tickets has reduced from hundreds to less than ten – leaving time for both companies to work on what’s really important.
Architecture Diagrams
