Suppose that you’ve purchased a home for $200,000.  Then you add a new kitchen, upgrade the baths, and maybe add some overall square footage and nicer exterior landscaping.  Would you want to limit your home insurance payout in the event of a disaster to the $200,000 you initially paid?  That’s a gamble that few would want to take.

But if you’re a prepaid service provider who’s considering expanding or upgrading to new high capacity servers, you may unintentionally be taking a similar gamble with your business.

The good news is that the new high-capacity servers with quad core CPUs enable you to manage your business on far fewer servers.  They can handle as much as 700% more calls per server than the servers you’ve probably been using for the last several years.  These new quad core CPUs deliver vast improvements in economy and operational efficiency, but unless you’ve planned carefully, there’s a potential downside; they also increase your susceptibility to revenue losses. 

A year or so ago, the loss of a single application server in a 40,000 call capacity business might have meant the loss of 5% of an established service provider’s total call processing capability.  When that same service provider migrates to quad core technology, then all other factors being equal, a single application server drop could predictably impact as much as 25-30% of call processing capacity, with a corresponding larger loss of CDRs and their associated revenues.

If you’re considering moving to quad core servers – and you should, by the way – it’s a good time to take a second look at high availability… both in terms of subscriber calls and in terms of your CDR administration.   

The good news is that the new hardware makes redundancy far less expensive in dollar terms than ever before.  With fewer servers handling more calls, it becomes easier and more economical to invest in redundancy.  A very modest investment in failover capabilities enables you to avoid:

•    Loss of CDR records and their associated revenue

•    Dropped calls

•    Customer loss as the result of poor service

If you’re running a strictly disposable card business with no top–ups, occasional subscriber call drops are, of course, unlikely to be your highest priority.  But if you’re focusing on or expanding into more sticky or reusable accounts – such as web-based top ups, then it’s well worth protecting both your call states and your brand’s integrity.  And regardless of whether you’re focusing on disposable or reusable services, protecting the CDRs for calls in process is clearly your number one goal. 

If the application server interrupts or fails before the call ends, then the CDR is often lost – along with the revenue for that call.  And their higher capacity means that when a quad-core server fails, then that failure will affect the CDRs of a lot more calls. 

There are a couple of ways to approach protecting the CDR. One is to shorten the frequency of account updates… some fans of this method suggest you do account updates as frequently as once or more a minute.  But that’s a retro approach with hidden overhead costs and drawbacks such as the consumption of significant amounts of available call processing capacity.

A better approach is a modest investment in redundancy, hardware and software that ensure that subscriber calls continue uninterrupted in the event of an application server hardware or software failure. This call protection works using 1:1 server redundancy that ensures that both the CDR and the subscribers’ calls are not affected by a server fault. 

Especially with the new affordability of call capacity – thanks to the quad core CPUs – this redundancy provides the CDR protection that your business deserves.

In addition to resiliency and revenue protection, this approach offers other benefits such as supporting traffic dashboards that let you view and analyze call destination patterns and routes usage rates in nearly real time.

With a little planning and just a little high-availability ‘insurance,’ you can leverage the great operational economies of the new quad cores – while protecting your business.



Ken Osowski is the VP of Marketing & Product Management at Pactolus Communications Software. He can be reached at keno@pactolus.com.