Amdocs Benchmark on IBM Servers and Storage

At Management World Americas 2009, Amdocs, provider of customer experience systems, unveiled the results of a benchmark that tested the Amdocs Convergent Charging product on IBM Power blade servers.

The results validate the strength of Amdocs Turbo Charging, Amdocs’ technology for real-time charging that delivers superior performance and scalability on low-cost hardware.

This benchmark outperformed results reported by other vendors in the industry when measuring real-time charging performance for 120 million prepaid subscribers. "As prepaid customer bases continue to surge in high growth markets, service providers require technology that can scale to support such volumes," said John Polly, vice president of sales for IBM’s Global Telecommunications Industry. "Together, IBM Power blade servers and Amdocs Turbo Charging deliver enhanced charging performance and scalability which translates into tremendous cost savings for prepaid providers."

Benchmark Highlights for 120 Million Prepaid Subscribers:

• Increased throughput: 230,000 events per second, which is equivalent to 276 million calls that can be processed during peak calling hours, also known as busy hour call attempts (BHCA) – demonstrates that the combination of Amdocs Convergent Charging with IBM’s BladeCenter JS43 blades running IBM’s AIX operating system can support large event volumes;
• Improved Central Processing Unit (CPU) efficiency: 3,300 events per second per core – shows Amdocs Convergent Charging’s ability to maximize the productivity of IBM POWER6 processors;
• Reduced hardware requirements: Amdocs Convergent Charging required just 15 IBM JS43 Blade servers, used in conjunction with IBM’s XIV Storage System with POWER6 microprocessors for thin provisioning capabilities (storage space is provisioned for based on actual usage and is not pre-allocated). This configuration demonstrates the hardware efficiencies and scalability achieved while supporting massive transaction volumes.

The benchmark also ran charging scenarios for 30 million postpaid subscribers in a consolidated prepaid/postpaid environment. Amdocs Convergent Charging uses Turbo Charging as its single, real-time charging technology for both prepaid and postpaid services. As data consumption continues to increase, a single real-time charging engine for prepaid and postpaid is essential for providing postpaid subscribers with insight into their data consumption in real-time to better monitor usage.

"With this benchmark, Amdocs and IBM have set an industry standard for speed and scalability while using low-cost hardware," said Seth Nesbitt, vice president of products and solutions at Amdocs. "A consolidated prepaid and postpaid charging environment, combined with the ability to process transactions at breakneck speed, can help service providers reduce operational and capital expenditure."

The benchmark was conducted in a production-like testing environment at the IBM Telecommunications Infrastructure Center for Business Support Systems in Montpellier, France.