Bangkok--21 Oct--Core & Peak
The role of telecommunications in the networked environment we live in today is huge. Tasked with the twin priorities of innovation and efficiency in search for profit, the telecommunications industry relies on technology to sustain the industry challenges. In this article, Taveesak Saengthong, Country Manager of Hitachi Data Systems - Thailand explains how an efficient storage strategy can support the industry and drive better results.
These are interesting times for the telecommunications industry. The much-vaunted truly mobile customer is now a reality thanks to ubiquitous 3G and Wi-Fi access. Convergence has also opened a world of opportunities for telecommunications providers. The merger between media and telecommunications has hardware and content to support the vision. While this presents huge market potential for telecommunications providers, it also comes with a number of challenges.
Most important, is the change in customer needs and demands. Increasingly empowered end-users are demanding lower prices and more convenience. For business service providers, companies are polarising between volume-based ‘utility’ models and value-added, service-based models. Finally, regulation adds a layer of complexity to the mix. To meet these different needs, telecommunications providers are finding that networks and service delivery models are growing in complexity. The need to manage data properly is paramount as it has the power to enhance telecommunications provider service offerings. Hu Yoshida, Hitachi Data Systems, Vice President and CTO notes that there is proof that the "tera era" has dawned, where terabytes replace gigabytes as the standard for storage capacity both for consumers.
Reducing Complexity, Gaining a Single Customer View
We work with a number of telecommunications providers in the region and note the extraordinary variety within their infrastructure. One of the telecommunications operators we work with had three different sets of storage systems. This threatened to take a toll on its IT infrastructure, operations and maintenance especially as the operator looked to gain a single view of their users. With more than 100 servers running different types of applications, there was no way for the customer to understand and track what was happening.
It was important that all information from customer records, financial systems, and employee resource planning (ERP) to the customer relationship management (CRM) database and billing systems, were accurate and up to date. It was clear that direct attached storage for each server was no longer an option as it did not meet new criteria for scalability and flexibility. In addition to this challenge, a growing customer base was straining capacity of the existing systems.
By implementing a virtualization-based data strategy, the company was able to simplify the management and monitoring of storage that allowed the company greater flexibility in terms of data migration and data replication. The operator was immediately able to see cost savings of 10-20 percent in human resources as a result in the decrease in the number of staff hours needed. They also made a 40 percent savings in hardware investments. Most importantly, the company was able to monitor performance and ensure that more that 90% of its infrastructure was utilised.
This is just one example as to how storage can help telecommunications operators to meet any kind of technical or business challenges that face the industry.
Innovative Storage Efficiency
In the fiercely competitive telecommunications industry, time to market and the rollout of new products and services ahead of competition is extremely crucial. Ensuring that mission-critical records, such as voice and general packet radio service (GPRS) data, are available and efficiently backed up, with minimal disruption to customers is also a top concern. The need for an innovative storage design and management is loud and clear.
An efficient and innovative SAN implementation can help telecommunications operators to unlock value from existing data and address the issue of scalability by optimizing resource usage and enabling storage to be provi?sioned easily as demands emerge. Managing storage tasks across the enterprise from a central console also helps in meeting service requests and replicate data at a faster pace.
Excellent customer ser?vice levels can be maintained, as efficient storage systems has the power to fortify data avail?ability and minimize downtime—scheduled and unscheduled—by providing customer service staff with uninterrupted access to account records and promotional offerings.
Supporting New Service Delivery with a New Approach
In Asia’s competitive marketplaces, ingenuity, creative content, and the ability to recognize and respond to rapidly changing customer demand is important. Lighting fast storage and 100% uptime while handling billions of files and hundreds of terabytes is crucial, and a day’s delay can make a difference.
Maintaining the lead in the telecommunications market is serious business—each time a service is introduced, it must be put through a test environment and a user acceptance testing system before going into production. For operator, this involves configuring a system as quickly as possible and providing the required data. But with a direct attached storage (DAS) infrastructure in place with a concurrent fragmentation of resources, operators can take up to 2-3 days to clone an environment.
To meet these challenges, progressive IT organizations have adopted a services oriented approach to managing core IT functions like storage. Services oriented storage can help organizations better manage IT infrastructures, become more efficient, and leverage existing IT investments, and yield significant cost savings in a scalable, reliable storage environment.
By utilising a service oriented storage solutions strategy, operators have found that they can easily unlock value from existing data and address the issue of scalability by optimizing resource usage and enabling storage to be provisioned easily as demands emerge. Some operators report an increase of 40% in the utilization of their systems and decrease in time to market.
In Conclusion
While mapping storage strategy, telecommunications organisations needs to ask some critical questions like ‘Is the mission-critical data protected?’, ‘Are we prepared for future growth?’, ‘Is our customer getting the right information at the right time?’
The next-generation telecommunications services will see an array of new services like Wimax, and getting the customers mind map will be even more critical.
What we do know is that an effective data management is a proven accelerator that can drives results, increase flexibility to meet unpredictable changes in demand, and can inevitably improve the customer experience. And there are no two ways about it.
For more information, please contact;
Srisuput Siangyen
Core & Peak
Tel: 0 2439 4600 ext. 8300
[email protected]