Press Release

Narus Sets Benchmark Standard for Telco-Grade Convergent Mediation with IBM and Intel

Achieve lowest cost of ownership using benchmark comparable to virtually every mobile user in the world accessing wireless services

Palo Alto, CA - January 27, 2003 — Narus, the leading provider of convergent OSS mediation solutions for communications service providers, announced today that it has established a new performance standard for IP mediation using Intel-based servers from IBM.

The performance level achieved - over 10 billion records per day1 ®C is equivalent to having all of the world's mobile phone users (currently estimated at one billion) each generating five billable events, such as placing a phone call, sending a short message or email or browsing a web-site via mobile phone, all in a 24 hour period on a single Narus system (with two records generated per event). The benchmark was performed using a cluster of 20 NEBS-compliant IBM eServer* xSeries** 343 systems with dual Intel® Pentium® III 1.26GHz processors running the open source Linux® operating system. The combination of carrier-grade industry standard Intel architecture-based servers and the open source Linux® operating system, shows how very high levels of performance and scalability can be achieved cost-effectively. In fact, Narus has exceeded this performance level in customer production environments; one major global production customer is processing over 12 billion IPDRs2 (Internet Protocol Detail Records) per day on a Narus system believed to be the world's largest mediation production environment.

Another major customer in Asia has not lost a single record after 10 months in production with Narus. Narus systems in benchmark and production environments provide virtually unsurpassed performance with zero data and revenue loss.

This scalability and performance is particularly relevant to tier 1 and 2 mobile operators whose business plans rely directly on maximizing Average Revenue Per User and lowering operational costs. In these environments, any data loss due to performance issues is directly translatable to lost revenue. Chorleywood Consulting in the UK and Deloitte & Touche studies indicate that carriers lose up to 14% of revenue from lost data. On a hundred million dollar service, this amounts to $14 million that could be added to a carrier°Øs top and bottom lines without adding any new subscribers.

Other key points and findings of the benchmark:

  • Narus, IBM, and Intel achieved the lowest hardware cost per CDR (Call Detail Record). Over a 5 year period, this means that for only $1.00 of hardware, operators can process over 228 million CDRs3. By deploying Narus versus other mediation products, carriers can save millions in underlying hardware and software costs while achieving some of the highest levels of mediation performance and scalability.
  • Narus achieved 10 billion records on the lowest cost hardware and software configuration. Other mediation vendors have come far short of these results even when resorting to very expensive SMP (Symmetric Multi Processor) hardware and software configurations.
  • Narus ran a sophisticated convergent mediation benchmark, converging mobile CDRs, WAP CDRs and MMS CDRs involving real world processing. Narus combines the ability to mediate more standardized G, S, and M-CDRs as well as records from WAP gateways and other content servers with legacy voice CDRs.
  • By combing CDR mediation from standard network elements (SGSN, GGSN, WAP gateway, etc.) and legacy voice switches with extremely detailed on-the-wire content mediation, Narus provides great flexibility in the billing or packaging of services. This gives mobile operators the ability to bill based on a usage-based service by specific content visited (e.g., by URL), quantity of emails sent, or specific download (e.g., ringtones, screensavers) to name just a few. This same capability also allows for settlement between the mobile operator and content providers. This also provides operators with detailed service level usage which they can use to create personalized services.

The benchmark was conducted at IBM's Linux for Service Providers Lab, where developers and customers can use a variety of IBM Linux systems and a world-class Telecom network environment, to test network-centric telecommunications applications including softswitch, wireless infrastructure, unified messaging, network services as well as stand-alone and integrated business applications. IBM is working with Intel in the LSPL to provide a real-world-like Telecom network environment where test loads of thousands of simulated users can be used to verify and validate Linux Telecom solutions.

"This benchmark confirms what we have seen in recent mobile performance comparisons against competitors during customer proof of concepts", said Peter Green, president and CEO, Narus. "In these environments, we found that our performance was 50-350% better than competitors, greatly cutting our customers' hardware costs. We could implement our solution in days rather than weeks or months allowing operators to deploy new services more quickly, more reliably and with far greater revenue assurance".

"IBM is helping carriers, network equipment providers and software developers, like Narus, put Linux to work in telecommunications to help lower costs and deliver higher performance," said Hernan Vega, VP, IBM Global Telecommunications Industry. "The work being done with Narus is one of the examples of how IBM is helping to reduce time-to-deployment for Linux Telecom solutions as well as bring cost and flexibility advantages of carrier grade Linux and applications to the telecom network."

"Narus' record-beating IP mediation benchmark using industry standard Intel architecture-based carrier-grade servers demonstrates the world-class scalability and cost-effectiveness of Intel-based servers in a core carrier application," according to Shantanu Gupta, Director, Enterprise and Telecom Platform Marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group.

"In today's telecom economy, two things are critical for carriers: They need to make the most of the systems they already have, and when they invest in new systems, they want to do so with established vendors like Narus who are dedicated to reducing existing cost structures and project risks," said Jason Briggs, program manager with research firm The Yankee Group. "By establishing a mediation benchmark that quantifies performance in terms of hardware cost necessary to run the benchmark, Narus is focusing on the true bottom line of product benchmarking -- cost savings."

Just as benchmarks for hardware and database software evolved into the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) in the 1980s and resulted in TPC benchmarks as a key measure of performance, Narus is now putting forth this benchmark as a standard for other mediation vendors to follow as a key measure of mediation performance. Narus was the first mediation vendor to run a mediation benchmark and this latest benchmark with IBM and Intel shatters previous performance levels. This achievement follows on a long list of Narus firsts: Narus was the first to introduce analyzer-based technology for true content based mediation at the application level; Narus was the first to offer real-time synergistic data collection and processing directly from the wire as well as directly from network elements. Narus was the first real-time IP mediation vendor and later was one of the first to offer convergent capabilities; Narus also co-founded the IPDR standard with AT&T.

# # #

*The IBM eServer brand consists of the established IBM e-business logo with the descriptive term "server" following it.
** IBM, the e-business logo, and xSeries are trademarks of IBM Corporation.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Intel, Pentium and Pentium III Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

  1. The test engagement of the Narus platform included three test configurations, testing performance and scalability of Narus' mediation solutions for mobile Internet service providers. Two performance benchmarks were conducted: The first with a single, inexpensive, dual CPU rack mounted server (IBM eServer xSeries 330). This system processed 5,783 records per second over a six hour period.

    The second benchmark was a scalability test with twenty IBM eServer xSeries dual CPU servers (Intel Pentium III 1.26GHz processors) running in parallel. Performance tests measured the number of records per day, or per second, and the number of records per second per processor. Every thirty seconds, a monitoring process recorded to a file the number of input events, input bytes, output events and output bytes that were processed by the Narus/IBM/Intel test system. The system mediated an average of 119,559 records per second over the test period (8:15pm to 4:04am). This translates into 10.3 billion over a 24 hour period. (119,559*60seconds*60minutes*24hours=10.3 billion).
  2. This figure provided by a global network service provider to Narus based on their existing deployment and reflects actual performance they have achieved in a production environment over the last 6 months.
  3. This is based on a hardware cost of $4,000 per server in the first benchmark test described above: 5,783 records per second results in 911,863,440,000 records over 5 years or 228 million records per $1.

 

 

 

About Narus, Inc.

Narus is the leader in real-time traffic intelligence for large IP networks, and is the only company that provides security, intercept and traffic management solutions within a single, flexible system. With Narus, service providers, governments and large enterprises around the world can immediately detect, analyze, mitigate and target any unwanted, unwarranted or malicious traffic. Narus provides its customers with complete, real-time insight into all of their IP traffic from the network to the applications. Combined with the ability to enable numerous actions, Narus customers have the ability to take the most appropriate actions quickly.

Narus’ system protects and manages the largest IP networks around the world including AT&T, KT (Korea), KDDI (Japan), Telecom Egypt, Reliance (India), Saudi Telecom, US Cellular and Pakistan Telecom Authority. Narus is headquartered in Mountain View, California with regional offices around the world. For more information, please visit www.narus.com.

Media Contact

Kathleen Shanahan
Boca Communications
T: 415.570.1405