Teradata Introduces Call Detail Records Appliance

Teradata Corporation announced the introduction of an advanced CDR appliance for the telecommunications industry. The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance for CDRs (call detail records) is a purpose-built platform that can load and store billions of CDRs at the lowest price per terabyte in the industry.

The appliance enables faster understanding of network performance and supports troubleshooting, capacity planning, least-cost routing and location-based analytics.

"CDRs are the greatest source of insight a carrier has about its network operations and customers. As services and offerings become increasingly complex, detail records are critical in understanding a customer’s experience; yet storing them creates massive amounts of data. A CDR warehouse allows you to effectively analyze this data which is essential for network engineers to do proper sizing, planning and troubleshooting of the network," said Ari Banerjee, director of the enabling technologies service provider group, Yankee Group.

The CDR appliance captures CDRs from the network, providing operations and engineering departments with information essential for effective network management such as call traffic patterns and call success or failure.

This rich data, including handset configuration and customers’ experience while on the network, help service providers in critical business areas such as:

• Operations: Network and equipment capacity can be used to their fullest, improving return on capital investments and reducing third-party network cost. In addition, service providers can more readily identify and verify problems associated with a particular handset or handset manufacturer.
• Capacity Planning: Traffic engineers can improve their ability to properly size the network using call detail to determine peak usage and enable efficient call routing.
• Revenue and Cost Management: Settlements between service providers depend on a complete capture of all transactions between the two entities for the given period. Incomplete information can result in a failure to bill accurately for all of the transactions and potentially lost revenue.

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance for CDRs loads information directly from the network in near-real time, capturing details about network performance while eliminating multiple instances of CDR data and the cost of storing and managing redundant data. Teradata’s patent-pending balanced index techniques greatly improve load and query performance. The CDR appliance can load billions of detail records per day associated with voice, data, Internet protocol, short message service transmission and switch and signaling performance. Teradata’s advanced compression capabilities yield a space savings of up to 70 percent — a 3x improvement in data storage requirements, enabling more data to be stored and lowering the cost per terabyte. Teradata Labs is in alpha testing of a software component to extend this improvement to 20x.

"Access to detailed data allows drill-down analysis, but keeping this data available for network support applications has been expensive. Therefore, all but the most recent CDR data is typically archived. This makes historical analysis difficult, if not impossible," said David Grant, vice president of global industry solutions, Teradata Corporation. "With the CDR appliance, service providers gain the value of a single source of detailed data at a far lower cost."

Because the CDR appliance is based on the Teradata Communications Logical Data Model, service providers can readily transfer data between the data warehouse appliance and their enterprise data warehouse for deeper analytics. A logical data model is a representation of an enterprise’s data, organized in terms of a particular data management technology and based on the semantics of the business.

As with all Teradata solutions, Teradata Professional Services consultants are available to translate a service provider’s business goals into technical requirements to leverage the explosive growth of data and gain the most value from their CDR appliance. "Teradata consultants’ expertise in CDR analysis has returned millions in investment to service providers through improved optimization of network configuration, capacity management and early detection of service quality issues," Grant said.

The CDR appliance is configured with the same core Teradata Database and tooling as the other Teradata data warehouse platforms and can scale to 50 petabytes of usable data across 1,024 nodes. It is available for a starting U.S. list price of $16,500 per terabyte.