Since  1992,  Empirix  has  helped  mobile,  LTE,  VoIP,  and  fixed  line  service  providers  maximize  the  value  of  network  technologies  and  infrastructure  investments.  Its  service  assurance  soluFons  –  which  span  tesFng,  monitoring,  and  analyFcs  –  empower  companies  to  fully  visualize  and  strategically  enhance  customer  experience.  Empirix  enables  operators  to  more  effecFvely  troubleshoot  problems,  resolve  interoperability  issues,  and  smoothly  incorporate  new  technologies.  The  firm  is  privately  held  and  headquartered  in  Bedford,  MA.

The Application

Successful  telecommunicaFons  and  service  providers  disFnguish  themselves  by  offering  not  only  high  caliber  technologies,  but  also  blue-­‐chip  customer  experiences.  Most  of  the  top  players  in  the  industry  tap  Empirix  to  power  their  service  assurance  systems.

“When  service  providers  want  to  know  about  customer  experience,  they’re  no  longer  interested  in  simply  knowing  whether  a  call  was  successful,  or  whether  someone  was  able  to  send  an  email,”  explains  Steve  Kish,  Director  of  Product  Management  at  Empirix.  “They  want  the  whole  picture  from  a  customer  perspecFve:  what’s  going  on  in  terms  of  mulFple  authenFcaFon  steps;  what’s  going  on  from  a  core  transport  perspecFve;  what’s  going  on  in  the  quality  of  service  the  customer  uses.  And  crucially,  they  want  to  see  all  of  these  things  in  the  same  place,  at  the  same  Fme,  and  correlated.”

The  first  step  in  service  assurance  is  establishing  a  system  for  capturing,  decoding  and  correlaFng  raw  packets  of  data.  Empirix  places  hardware-­‐based  appliances  called  mulF-­‐service  probes  (MSP)  out  at  various  interface  points  in  a  customer  network.  The  MSPs  monitor  data  as  it  flows  through  the  network,  generaFng  ApplicaFon  Service  Detail  Records  (ASDR),  which  reflect  highly  detailed  per  session  or  call  informaFon.  If  a  subscriber  visits  a  website,  for  example,  an  ASDR  will  communicate  nearly  everything  about  the  session:  network  elements  involved,  strength  of  the  connecFon,  customer  informaFon,  and  quanFty  of  informaFon  downloaded.

As  service  providers  need  the  ability  to  understand  customer  experience  across  mulFple  points  in  their  networks,  Empirix  sends  the  ASDRs  from  mulFple  probes  to  a  centralized  probe  management  and  correlaFon  server,  known  as  the  Regional  OperaFon  Server  (ROS).  The  ASDRs  are  wri\en  to  a  VerFca  database  in  real  Fme  with  compression  algorithms  used  to  allow  Empirix  to  meet  demanding  customer  requirements  for  historical  storage.  UFlizing  the  ROS  with  a  VerFca  database,  service  providers  are  able  to  run  many  concurrent  queries  with  excepFonal  response  Fme.  

“Vertica transformed the way Empirix collects, processes and analyzes data...”

- Steve Kish, Director of Product Management, Empirix

An HP Company

Discover the Power of Vertica The Vertica Analytics Platform enables companies to monetize 100% of their data through analytic insights. Built from the ground up, Vertica was designed with 21st century Big Data challenges in mind. Key features include :

Real-time AnalyticsDealing with your data in real-time – consume, analyze and make decisions at the speed of business.

Advanced In-Database AnalyticsFlexible library of features and functions to explore and process data close to the CPU core.

Agile DeploymentMaximizing !exibility - deploy Vertica on industry standard hardware, virtual machines, or on the cloud.

Fastest Time to ValueShortening the time to value - monetizing your data in a matter of minutes, not hours, months or years.

Scale-Out MPP ArchitectureAutomatically scale linearly and limitlessly by adding industry standard x86 servers to the grid.

Native BI, ETL, & Hadoop IntegrationSeamlessly integrate with a robust and ever growing ecosystem of analytics solutions.

Vertica - Analytics Everywhere™

www.vertica.com/evaluate

CASE STUDY - EMPIRIX

About VerticaVertica, an HP Company, is the leading provider of next-generation analytics platforms enabling customers to monetize ALL of their data. The elasticity, scale, performance, and simplicity of the Vertica Analytics Platform are unparalleled in the industry, delivering 50x-1000x the performance of traditional solutions at 30% the total cost of ownership. With data warehouses and data marts ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to multiple petabytes, Vertica’s 600+ customers are rede"ning the speed of business and competitive advantage. Vertica powers some of the largest organizations and most innovative business models globally including Zynga, Groupon, Twitter, Verizon, Guess Inc., Admeld, Capital IQ, Mozilla, AT&T, and Comcast.

Vertica, An HP Company 8 Federal Street, Billerica, MA 01821 +1.978.600.1000 TEL +1.978.600.1001 FAX www.vertica.com© Vertica 2012. All rights reserved. All other company, brand and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

“From  customer  service  agents  to  level  3  engineering  technicians,  our  soluFon  has  to  be  able  to  quickly  handle  any  type  of  query  that  service  providers  throw  our  way,”  Kish  said.  “This  requires  the  technical  ability  to  pull  together  massive  amounts  of  granular,  highly  fragmented  probe  data,  and  make  it  neatly  accessible  in  seconds.”

“When  Steve  calls  about  a  network  problem,  an  operator  should  be  able  to  pull  up  all  of  his  records  from  the  last  15  minutes.  Or,  more  complex:  the  operator  thinks  Steve  experienced  a  problem  in  an  IMS  network,  and  it  may  have  something  to  do  with  the  services  he’s  provisioned  for.  The  operator  should  be  able  to  run  a  query  examining  Diameter  messages  that  were  correlated  to  SIP  messages  from  a  specific  endpoint  ID  between  two  points  of  Fme.

“VerFca  allows  our  service  providers  to  do  this  with  the  click  of  a  mouse.”

The Challenge

Before  implemenFng  VerFca  in  2011,  Empirix  used  a  MySQL  database.  “To  a  certain  scaling  extent,  MySQL  was  perfectly  fine,”  Kish  said.  But  the  heavy  licing  inevitably  took  its  toll.

“We  got  to  a  point  where  MySQL  was  just  running  out  of  gas,”  he  said.  “The  ROS’s  we  provided  were  geeng  overwhelmed  by  the  volume  of  ASDRs  collected  by  the  probes.  Of  course,  the  operators  had  no  sympathy  for  us.  We  needed  to  move  into  a  new  database  architecture  that  could  scale  much  more  successfully  with  our  business.”

The Solution

Within  Empirix’s  engineering  team,  there  was  a  rigorous  evaluaFon  of  different  databases.  Kish  said  VerFca  stood  out  for  three  reasons.

“First,  VerFca  scales  out  almost  limitlessly  on  COTS  chassis  and  standard  processors.  Second,  it  has  excellent  performance  on  cost-­‐effecFve  hardware;  it  offers  flexible  compression  techniques  and  very  efficient  I/O,  which  allows  us  to  achieve  high  load  rates  and  fast  mulF-­‐query  results.  Third,  it  embeds  seamlessly  in  the  Empirix  soluFon,  so  our  customers  don’t  need  to  worry  about  database  administraFon.  We  squarely  came  around  to  the  fact  that  VerFca  was  the  best  plaiorm  out  there.”

Running  VerFca  on  the  same  commodity  hardware  as  before,  Expirix  has  achieved  a  3x  increase  in  database  write  performance,  from  1,000  sessions  per  second,  per  regional  server,  to  3,000.

The Final Word

Kish  said  VerFca  has  transformed  the  way  Empirix  collects,  processes,  and  analyzes  data.  “We  can  now  go  to  carriers  and  tell  them,  ‘As  you  grow  your  traffic,  we  have  a  soluFon  that  not  only  solves  our  previous  limitaFons,  but  also  scales  up  to  give  all  kinds  of  headroom  going  forward.’

“By  partnering  with  VerFca  and  leveraging  its  architectural  strength,  we’re  able  to  provide  operators  the  tools  they  need  to  confidently  interpret  customer  experience—even  as  the  data  tsunami  rolling  across  their  networks  conFnues  to  grow.”

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