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Oracle Communications Convergent Charging and Policy Solution Benchmark on Oracle SuperCluster M7 O R A C L E W H I T E P A P E R | D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6



1 | ORACLE COMMUNICATIONS CONVERGENT CHARGING AND POLICY SOLUTION BENCHMARK ON ORACLE SUPERCLUSTER M7

Introduction

The rise in smartphone and tablet usage—coupled with increasing data speeds and network

technology evolution, both for mobile and fixed connections—is contributing to an exponential increase

in the consumption of data services, placing greater demands on communications service providers

(CSPs) to effectively monetize the “digital experience.” The Oracle Communications Convergent

Charging and Policy Solution enables CSPs to combine business and network policies to rapidly

launch innovative offers and empower customers to personalize and control their usage experience,

accelerating service monetization at a predictable cost of ownership.

The Oracle Communications Performance Engineering Group conducted a comprehensive test to

demonstrate the extreme performance, robust carrier-grade capabilities, and outstanding

price/performance value of the solution’s charging capabilities on Oracle SuperCluster M7 (see Figure

1). Realistic test scenarios included large customer profiles and long data session management

alongside full invoicing and bill generation.

Figure 1. Oracle Communications Convergent Charging and Policy Solution


Oracle SuperCluster M7 is the world’s fastest engineered system, delivering incredible performance

under a wide range of workloads ranging from traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP), to

customer relationship management (CRM) and data warehouses, to e-commerce, mobile applications,

and real-time analytics. Equally importantly, it is extremely cost-effective because of its low purchase

price and the ease with which it can be deployed, scaled, managed, and maintained.

The test scenarios modeled 7 million subscribers generating continual data sessions with concurrent

online and offline charging traffic. Oracle achieved an average end-to-end online charging latency of 7

milliseconds for data throughput of 14,000 online and offline operations per second on a partial Oracle

SuperCluster M7.

Performance Test Description

System Configuration

This performance test focused on the end-to-end performance of the solution architecture applied to online and

offline charging models. Figure 2 illustrates the logical call flows and data transfers between each architectural

component.

Figure 2. Logical architecture for testing online charging and offline charging capabilities

Data Composition

On Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle Communications BRM), 7 million subscriber

accounts were provisioned using a combination of account types for testing various business scenarios. For billing

and invoicing tests, the accounts were provisioned using a mixture of 500, 1,000, and 1,500 usage events per

account. A single schema with all 7 million subscribers having different customer profiles using large customer

profiles (of sizes 13 KB, 20 KB, and 34 KB) with many services was used for data creation.


Hardware Platform

Oracle Communications Convergent Charging and Policy Solution was hosted on Oracle SuperCluster M7 for

extreme performance, massive scalability, and maximum availability. Oracle SuperCluster M7 is a ready-to-deploy

secure cloud infrastructure for both databases and applications. It is an engineered system that combines compute,

networking, and storage hardware with virtualization, operating system, and management software into a single

system that is extremely easy to deploy, secure, manage and maintain. Oracle SuperCluster M7 features the

industry’s most advanced security, incorporating a number of unique runtime security technologies, documented and

tested system-wide security controls and best practices, and integrated automated compliance verification tools.

Oracle SuperCluster M7 is the world’s fastest engineered system, delivering incredible performance under a wide

range of workloads ranging from traditional enterprise resource planning, to customer relationship management and

data warehouses, to e-commerce, mobile applications, and real-time analytics. Equally importantly, it is extremely

cost effective because of its low purchase price; the ease with which the system can be deployed, scaled, managed,

and maintained; and its incredibly efficient use of space, power, compute resources, storage, memory, and software

licenses.

Figure 3. Oracle SuperCluster M7

Oracle SuperCluster M7 is built on the fastest and most advanced server with the world’s fastest microprocessor,

the fastest database storage, a fast networking and operating system combination, and unique capabilities for

securing application data, accelerating databases, and running Java applications.

» The SPARC M7 high-performance microprocessor is the world’s fastest microprocessor for general-purpose

computing and integrates additional performance enhancements for cryptographic acceleration and Oracle

Database 12c directly into the processor design.

» SPARC M7 In-Line Decompression allows Oracle Database 12c to store databases many times larger than

the physical memory in the system entirely in memory in a highly compressed format using dedicated functions in

the microprocessor itself and frees valuable general-purpose compute cores for SQL processing.

» SPARC M7 In-Memory Query Acceleration for Oracle Database In-Memory in Oracle Database 12c drives

simultaneous real-time analytics and transaction processing performance up to 9x better than x86 or IBM Power

systems

» Oracle Exadata Storage Server, coengineered with Oracle Database, delivers the optimal balance of scalability,

transaction processing, and batch performance for all Oracle Database workloads.

» Oracle’s InfiniBand fabric is the low-latency, high throughput I/O fabric that ties all of the Oracle SuperCluster

system components together, making it possible to horizontally scale the Oracle SuperCluster system.


Server Virtualization

Oracle VM Server for SPARC is a free virtualization technology that is integrated with Oracle SuperCluster M7. In

addition, Oracle Solaris 11 enables no-compromise virtualization, allowing enterprise workloads to be run within a

virtual environment at no performance cost, as if they were run in a bare-metal environment. Oracle VM Server for

SPARC logical domains (LDoms) and physical domains (PDoms) on Oracle’s high-end systems, such as the Oracle

SuperCluster M7 system used in these tests, provide a feature-rich environment to suit every workload while

providing extreme administrative efficiency. In addition, Oracle VM Server for SPARC is recognized as a license

boundary by most enterprise software vendors, leading to significant cost savings.

The deployed architecture shown in Figure 4 was configured as follows:

» Four PDoms per Oracle SuperCluster M7 with a total of 11 LDoms

» The following for each PDom:

» 1024 GB of RAM

» 4 x one-socket 4.133 GHz Oracle SPARC M7 processor with 32 cores and 8 strands for a total of 1,024

virtual CPUs

» The following I/O domains were configured:

» Chassis 0

PDOM0: one I/O domain with 22 cores and 336 GB RAM, one I/O domain with 12 cores and144 GB RAM

PDOM1: one I/O domain with 22 cores and 336 GB RAM, one I/O domain 22 cores and 368 GB RAM

» Chassis 1

PDOM0: one I/O domain with 22 cores and 336 GB RAM, one I/O domain with 22 cores and 368 GB RAM

PDOM1: one I/O domain with 22 cores and 336 GB RAM, one I/O domain with 22 cores and 368 GB RAM

A three node Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) database was configured using d1 from

Chassis 0-PDOM0, Chassis0-PDOM1, and Chassis1-PDOM0 and used three Oracle Exadata Storage

Servers (also called storage cells). The other three available storage cells were assigned to another project

and isolated, demonstrating the secure multitenancy environment of Oracle SuperCluster M7.

» Three database LDoms with 20 cores and 256 GB of RAM were configured with the following:

» Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 with Oracle Automatic Storage Management and

Oracle RAC

» Oracle Solaris 11.3

» Eight LDoms were created to host applications in Oracle Solaris Zones:

» The global zone ran Oracle Solaris 11.3 and was allocated two cores and 16 GB RAM

» Seven application zones ran Oracle Solaris 10 branded zones and were allocated 20 cores

» One application zone ran Oracle Solaris 10 branded zones and was allocated 10 cores

» Four application LDoms with 22 cores and 336 GB of RAM were configured with the following:

» Three Oracle Communications BRM and Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (Oracle

Communications ECE) 11.3.0.0.0 server nodes

» Coresident on each LDom with Oracle Communications ECE: Oracle NoSQL Database 3.5.2 in a

fault-tolerant 3x3 high-availability configuration

» Coresident on one LDom: Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.6 and Oracle Communications Pricing Design

Center (Oracle Communications PDC) 11.1.0.7

» Coresident on one LDom: The Customer Updater component of Oracle Communications ECE

» One LDom running the Diameter Gateway (DGW) component of Oracle Communications ECE


» Three application LDoms with 22 cores and a total of 368 GB of RAM were configured with the following:

» One LDom running Oracle Communications BRM 7.5.0.15.0 coresident with Real-time Transport Protocol

(RTP) and the Oracle Communications BRM External Manager (EM) Gateway

» Two LDoms configured with Oracle Communications BRM were provisioned as spares

» One application LDom with 12 cores and 144 GB of RAM ran Oracle Communications Offline Mediation

Controller 6.0.0.3.3

Figure 4. Oracle SuperCluster M7 deployment Architecture

Software Inventory

TABLE 1. SOFTWARE

Category Name Category Name

Runtime Products » Groovy 2.3.9

» Java Development Kit 1.7.0.80

(32- and 64-bit); 1.8.0_65 (64-bit)

Middleware Products » Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.6

» Oracle Application Development Framework

runtime 11.1.1.6

Database

Products

» Oracle Coherence 12.2.1.0.2

» Oracle NoSQL Database 3.5.2

» Oracle Database JDBC driver 7

» Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition

Release 12.1.0.2.0, 64-bit production

» Oracle Database 11g 11.2.0.3.0, client

64-bit

» Oracle Database 11.2.0.1.0, client 32-bit

RMS Products » Oracle Communications Pricing Design Center

11.1.0.7

» Oracle Communications Offline Mediation

Controller 6.0.0.3.3

» Oracle Communications BRM Elastic Charging

Engine 11.3.0.0.0

» Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue

Management 7.5.0.15.0

OS Products » Oracle Solaris 11.3 SPARC 64-bit:

database

» Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 s10 SPARC

64-bit: app

Performance Results


Industry-Leading Charging Performance and Scalability

Figure 5 shows the total provisioned compute capacity (as measured by the number of CPU cores) for a deployment

scenario of 7 million subscribers. An approximation of the maximum average percentage utilization for charging for

online and offline traffic as well as billing or invoicing is shown as a proportion of the total core count.

Figure 5. Compute capacity and utilization for 7 million subscribers

Realistic Traffic Workload

Online and offline data traffic was generated for 7 million subscribers. Oracle Communications Offline Mediation

Controller generated offline traffic at a rate of 2,500 operations per second and the open source Seagull traffic

generator generated 11,500 operations per second of online traffic. Traffic was generated at an overall rate of 7.2

operations per subscriber per hour. Longer data sessions were maintained for all subscribers with mid-session call

detail record (CDR) generation every 30 minutes. Over 50 million operations were executed in an hour.

Rated Event Loader (REL)

Rated events were extracted from Oracle NoSQL Database using the Rated Event Formatter (REF) process. These

were loaded into the Oracle Communications BRM database using the REL process using parallel threads. On the

Oracle Communications BRM side, the REL performance was measured at throughput rates of up to 11,000 CDRs

per second on a single schema. In the test, the REL was started after a large backlog of CDRs had accumulated.

TABLE 2. REL THROUGHPUT

REL Test Number of

Files

Total Number

of CDRs

Average

CDRs/File

Throughput

CDRs/Second Details

Test 1 2,266 13,686,796 6,040 11,028 On an empty EVENT_T partition

Test 2 5,763 24,477,845 7,319 4,861 On a loaded EVENT_T partition with 40 million rows

Exceptional Performance with Low Response Times


In a series of traffic tests, the response times in the reported results demonstrate that Oracle Communications

Convergent Charging and Policy Solution was able to deliver and sustain the required performance levels for a very

large subscriber deployment. The Oracle Communications BRM and Oracle Communications ECE charging

response times are reported separately from the end-to-end response times representing the complete processing

flow for online and offline traffic. A sampling of the traffic activity during the three-hour test run reported that a total of

134,926,594 operations had been completed.

In Figure 6 for online charging at a rate of 11,500 operations per second, the Seagull response times represent the

end-to-end latency on the Seagull traffic generator. These response times averaged 6 ms. The DGW response

times represent the latency measured on the DGW (which provides the service that routes traffic from Seagull to

Oracle Communications ECE). Meanwhile the Oracle Communications ECE Client response times were also

measured on the DGW and were defined as being the round-trip time from the DGW to Oracle Communications

ECE excluding the DGW processing time. The Oracle Communications ECE server response times were measured

on Oracle Communications ECE as it performed the charging operation.

Figure 6. Percentiles of response times for charging of online traffic

In Figure 7 for the combination of online and offline charging running concurrently for a total workload of 14,000

operations per second, each of the data series had the same definition as in Figure 6. The averaged reported end-

to-end latency was 7 ms for Seagull traffic.

Average latency 6 ms


Figure 7. Percentiles of response times for charging online and offline traffic

In Figure 8 for offline charging at a rate of 2,500 operations per second, the client response times were the latencies

observed on the Offline Mediation Controller. The server response times were observed on Oracle Communications

ECE. The average latency observed was 4 ms on the client and 3 ms on the server.

Figure 8. Percentiles of response times for charging of offline traffic




High Volume Billing and Invoicing Throughput

Billing and invoicing tests were conducted separately and utilized 40 threads for processing, respectively. The

number of events per subscriber was varied to profile the throughput and CPU utilization for different scenarios. The

Oracle Communications BRM database was fully populated (for example, there were about 7 billion rows in the

EVENT_BAL_IMPACTS_T table).

To help make the size of the database more manageable for processing, the Oracle Partitioning option for Oracle

Database was used extensively. Partition pruning optimizations to the SQL execution plan were employed to

improve performance. Reducing the amount of data that needed to be scanned helped ensure that the Exadata

Smart Flash Cache serviced the majority of the disk reads. The total size of this cache increases with each

incremental Oracle Exadata Storage Server. The large cache provided by three Oracle Exadata Storage Servers

that are integral components of Oracle SuperCluster M7 was used.

In one test scenario with a billing cycle size of 100,000 accounts—each with 500 events per account—Oracle

Communications BRM achieved on a per-schema basis 120 bills per second with complex deferred taxation and

161 detailed invoices per second, as shown in gure 9 and 10. Billing and invoicing are very

resource-intensive on storage, because they must process vast amounts of data. A very high throughput for billing

and invoicing was achieved by utilizing the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers that are integral components of Oracle

SuperCluster M7. With this increase in storage and I/O operations per second (IOPS) capacity, these processes

generated higher throughput. I/O, rather than CPU or processing contention, was the limitation in the tests.

Figure 9. Billing throughput


Figure 10. Invoicing throughput

Conclusion

This comprehensive set of performance tests demonstrates that Oracle Communications

Convergent Charging and Policy Solution can deliver unprecedented performance and scalability

for service providers looking to monetize, control, and manage revenue for their communications

services, and it is very well complemented by the Oracle SuperCluster M7 system’s incredible

performance and ability to consolidate database and applications.

Oracle Corporation, World Headquarters

500 Oracle Parkway

Redwood Shores, CA 94065, USA

Worldwide Inquiries

Phone: +1.650.506.7000

Fax: +1.650.506.7200

Copyright © 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Oracle Communications Convergent Charging and Policy Solution Benchmark on Oracle SuperCluster M7 December 2016

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