Accelerating Telecom Business Software with Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory

Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent MemoryTelecommunications

AsiaInfo Technologies is poised to extend its leadership in business support systems (BSSs) by taking advantage of latency reductions enabled by Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory.

The global telecom industry is poised for a wave of change to accommodate emergent shifts in the ways customers consume telecom services. 5G networks are expected to come online in 2020, providing a massive increase in data rates that will support a wealth of new usages, ranging from augmented and virtual reality to fully connected driverless cars. Billions of new, connected IoT devices will expand the size of wireless providers’ networks and provide an unprecedented diversity of endpoints and data types.

Another factor in the shifting market outlook is that business adoption of cloud and edge computing will continue to expand, putting further demands on the network. Supporting more than one billion users, AsiaInfo is China’s largest BSS provider and serves telecom carriers that include China Mobile, Chinese Unicom, and China Telecom. The founder and chairman of BSS provider AsiaInfo Technologies, Tian Suning, summarizes this shift: “The business-to-business era of software, where software connects everything from mobile to computers, is coming. We need to innovate as the huge wave of 5G industrial internet comes to China.”1

Market research indicates that the global digital BSS market will grow from USD 2.8 billion in 2018 to USD 5.8 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.2 percent.2 This massive expansion of data and new usage models will place new demands on BSS infrastructure.

AsiaInfo is helping drive that growth and rising to future challenges through BSS innovation that spans both software and hardware. The company has optimized its BSS application for Intel Optane DC persistent memory to reduce latency for a better customer experience.

Intel Optane DC persistent memory provides profound changes to the architecture of the memory subsystem, making it the primary data tier for both working data and long-term storage. It combines byte-addressability similar to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) with persistence similar to storage. That combination means that it can be mapped directly into application address space, eliminating the bottleneck associated with reads and writes to conventional storage.

AsiaInfo BSS runs customer-facing business operations, for both traditional telecom services and modern digital ones, such as over-the-top (OTT) content. It provides flexible, high-performance services that help providers manage customers, products, orders, and revenue effectively across operational categories such as the following:

• Customer types: consumer and business

• Payment methods: prepaid, postpaid, and hybrid

• Network connections: mobile, fixed premises, and IP

• Service types: voice, data, messaging, and video

WORKLOAD bRief

Solution Brief | Accelerating Telecom Business Software with Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory

Tailoring BSS Operation to Meet Emerging ChallengesAs the telecom industry continues to become more competitive, carriers must be judicious in their use of resources, including being cost conscious with regard to technology and equipment. This factor plays a significant role as carriers roll out or expand support for trends such as 5G, IoT, cloud, and edge computing. Particularly in the realm of BSS server hardware, the increasing cost of DRAM complicates carrier efforts to balance cost and performance requirements.

BSS servers are typically configured with large amounts of memory; 768 GB or more is not uncommon. Because deploying these large capacities is often cost-prohibitive, carriers may provision these servers with less than optimal memory resources. As a result, application latency and response times are not as low as they can be, especially for complex queries against the BSS. AsiaInfo is responding to this challenge by optimizing its application for Intel Optane DC persistent memory.

With near-DRAM performance and expected lower cost, Intel Optane DC persistent memory enables BSS servers to be provisioned with larger amounts of total memory, without increasing system cost. These expanded resources enable the server to store more data closer to the processor, where it can be rapidly accessed for use in queries and computations. Greater capacity reduces the incidence of data spilling over and having to be written to and read from disk, resulting in fast access times.

AsiaInfo collaborated with Intel to optimize their Business Support System application for the new memory architecture. That work included redesign of key aspects of the software framework. It also required development of benchmarking and testing techniques tailored to both the hardware and software for accurate and flexible measurement of key performance indicators (KPIs) on systems equipped with Intel Optane DC persistent memory.

Customer Pain Points:

• Complex queries take a long time to execute due to the amount of data processing required and limited affordable memory capacity.

Why Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory:

• Store more data close to the processor

• Reduce frequent accesses to disk

Value Proposition:

• Faster response times on complex queries at similar cost to DRAM

AsiaInfoBusiness Support

System

Figure 1. Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory reduces query response time (latency) for AsiaInfo BSS.3

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0.5

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Up to 68 PercentReduction in Latency

Intel® Xeon®processor

E5-2699 v4

Intel® Xeon®Platinum 8180

Processor

2nd Gen Intel®Xeon® Platinum 8280

Processor + Intel®Optane™ DC

Persistent Memory

Nor

mal

ized

Per

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Normalized Query Response Time (Latency)(Lower is Better)

0.32

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Driving Up Responsiveness for Business OperationsSince the AsiaInfo BSS application is primarily memory-bound, it shows outstanding results with Intel Optane DC persistent memory, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Compared to a typical BSS server from a few years ago, refreshing with a new system based on the 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8280 processor and Intel Optane DC persistent memory enables up to a 68 percent reduction in response time for complex queries.3 For new servers based on the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor, the addition of Intel Optane DC persistent memory reduces response time for AsiaInfo BSS by up to 30 percent, compared to the same server with DRAM alone.3

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Solution Brief | Accelerating Telecom Business Software with Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory

Rapid ApplicationRecovery

Low-LatencyData Access

Direct ApplicationAccess to Memory

System retains data inpersistent memoryduring power cycles

Data is accessed fromthe memory bus instead

of the slower I/O bus

AsiaInfo BSS bypassesthe OS, for a direct path

to system memory

AsiaInfo unlocks even greater value from Intel Optane DC persistent memory by enabling App Direct Mode. This approach makes separate volatile and persistent memory stores available to the BSS. The software can place large data structures and data that must be retained long-term on Intel Optane DC persistent memory, accelerating operations using a data caching structure based on conventional DRAM. This arrangement enables AsiaInfo BSS to tailor the memory subsystem to the individual needs of the workload, further enhancing performance.

App Direct Mode delivers a range of benefits to AsiaInfo’s BSS customers, as illustrated in Figure 2. By bypassing the operating system and accessing memory directly, AsiaInfo BSS removes overhead and reduces the latency associated with data retrieval. Contributing further to that latency reduction, it accesses data directly from the memory bus instead of the I/O bus, reducing access times. In addition, because App Direct Mode makes use of memory persistence, data remains in memory even during power cycles or outages, which accelerates recovery and reduces business impacts.

Figure 2. Key benefits of Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory App Direct Mode for AsiaInfo BSS.

Advantages Across the Hardware StackThe performance advantages of Intel Optane DC persistent memory are complemented by those delivered by the latest 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor. With up to 48 cores and six memory channels, the processor provides pervasive performance in the data center and can be equipped with as much as 6 TB of total system memory. This combination of hardware components represents engineering across the hardware stack that delivers higher performance than predecessors, both for AsiaInfo and across the enterprise.

Extracting More Value from DataBy providing faster queries, AsiaInfo enables service providers to process more business data in less time, driving greater value from it. For example, accelerating business intelligence operations, telecom operators can perform larger numbers of more sophisticated analyses based on user data. That leads to a higher degree of insight that can direct day-to-day business operations with better decision making that can ultimately help carriers achieve a competitive advantage as their networks evolve to handle new data types and expanded data volumes.

The increased performance sets the stage for additional features and capabilities, such as real-time monitoring of KPIs and personalized reporting. Ultimately, implementing AsiaInfo BSS on servers equipped with Intel Optane DC persistent memory can help deliver a better user experience as well as cost savings.

Redefining the Enterprise Memory TierIntel Optane DC persistent memory offers two distinct operating modes: Memory Mode and App Direct Mode. In Memory Mode, it behaves exactly like traditional, volatile (non-persistent) system memory at lower cost, enabling higher capacities within a constant system budget. Modules are available in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB.

ConclusionAs factors such as mainstream AI, IoT, and enhanced cloud services drive up data volumes and diversity on telecom networks, Intel Optane DC persistent memory can help AsiaInfo BSS keep pace. Lower system latency provides faster response times on complex BSS queries against these novel data sets. These advances will help the telecom industry thrive on change instead of struggling to accommodate it.

Developer Edge with Persistent MemoryIntel® Optane™ DC persistent memory revolutionizes the performance equation with big, affordable, persistent storage on the memory bus. Use it to achieve lower latency, higher resilience, and more performance for your applications.

Learn more at software.intel.com/pmem

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Solution Brief | Accelerating Telecom Business Software with Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory

Solution provided by:

Take the Next Step

Learn more about Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory: www.intel.com/OptaneDCPersistentMemory

Learn how Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory gives developers a competitive edge: software.intel.com/pmem

Learn more about the latest 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® processors: www.intel.com/XeonScalable

Contact AsiaInfo sales or sign up for a free trial: enquiry@asiainfo.com

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1 Standard & Poor’s Global Market Intelligence, Chinese telecom provider AsiaInfo Technologies preps for 5G ahead of IPO, https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/kioj0lviutcjws6aj0stja2.

2 PR Newswire,“Global Digital Business Support System (BSS) market size to grow at a CAGR of 15.2%, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-digital-business-support-system-bss-market-size-to-grow-at-a-cagr-of-15-2-300763635.html.

3 AsiaInfo Telco BSS* 3.1.1 + self-defined workload. OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux* 7.5 kernel 3.10.0-957.1.3.el7.x86_64. Testing by Intel and AsiaInfo completed on Dec 28, 2018. Security Mitigations for Variants 1, 2, 3 and L1TF in place.

BASELINE: 2S Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2699 v4, 2.5 GHz, 18 cores, turbo and HT on, BIOS 251R01, 256 GB total memory, 32 slots / 32 GB / 1600 MT/s / DDR4 LRDIMM, 7 x 800 GB, Intel SSD DC S3700 + 4 2-TB Intel® SSD Data Center Family for NVMe*.

NEXT GEN: Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 processor, 2.5 GHz, 28 cores, turbo and HT on, BIOS x0007, 768 GB total memory, 32 slots / 32 GB / 1600 MT/s / DDR4 LRDIMM, 7 x 800 GB, Intel SSD DC S3700 + 4 2-TB Intel SSD Data Center Family for NVMe.

NEW: 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8280 processor, 2.7 GHz, 28 cores, turbo and HT on, BIOS 1.018, 192 GB total memory, 12 slots / 16 GB / 1600 MT/s / DDR4 LRDIMM and 8 slots/ 128 GB / Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, 7 x 800 GB, Intel SSD DC S3700 + 4 2-TB Intel SSD Data Center Family for NVMe.

Performance results are based on testing as of Dec 28, 2018 and may not reflect all publicly available security updates. See configuration disclosure for details. No product can be absolutely secure. All information provided here is subject to change without notice. Contact your Intel representative to obtain the latest Intel product specifications and roadmaps. Intel processors of the same SKU may vary in frequency or power as a result of natural variability in the production process. For more complete information about performance and benchmark results, visit www.intel.com/benchmarks. Intel does not control or audit third-party benchmark data or the web sites referenced in this document. You should visit the referenced web site and confirm whether referenced data are accurate. Performance results are based on testing and may not reflect all publicly available security updates. See configuration disclosure for details. No product can be absolutely secure. Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are

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