Telecoms leader cuts database run times up to 90%

Bezeq is the leading telecommunications provider in Israel, offering phone and internet services, smart devices, cybersecurity and cloud backup services. Its data warehouse holds over 118 TB of vital data on sales, services, financial transactions, engineering device and customer interactions – data used to generate reports that help management streamline operations. The data warehouse is also supporting an expansion into promising new lines of business such as high-performance computing and hosted cloud services. Several years ago, Bezeq migrated from an Oracle Exadata system to a Hitachi UCP with internal Fusion IO and a Hitachi VSP F400 all-flash array connected via Fibre Channel. But recently, the storage solution’s insufficient throughput, slow response times, and inability to be expanded led the IT team to seek a revamp.

"The Excelero NVMesh software-defined technology is the only technological solution that meets our performance demands and has proven to be an excellent decision,” said Muginstein Igal, storage and backup team manager at Bezeq. “As a leader in the national communications market, we are on the look-out for promising new technologies. NVMesh is a highly advanced solution and we have quickly seen the tangible benefits of replacing the complicated server with internal SSD and all-flash array with the simplicity and scale of Excelero NVMesh.”

The new infrastructure incorporates Excelero NVMesh running on a Fujistu RX4770 server, featuring 96 cores and 1TB memory, and Fujitsu RX2540 storage nodes with 4 TB NVMe drives - totalling 48 TB. The servers are connected with Mellanox 100 Gbps Ethernet switches and NICs. A key benefit of NVMesh was the flexibility to choose the most suitable and cost-effective commodity hardware for Bezeq's requirements, eliminating vendor lock-in. Early trials showed that in contrast to the maximum 8 Gbps throughput of the Fusion IO devices, the NVMesh environment delivered 16-23 Gbps – well above Bezeq’s requested 15 Gbps throughput. The Excelero storage also reduced run times by an average of 30% compared to the legacy all-flash array environment, and in some workloads, reduced run times up to 90%. Replacement was simple and while formal metrics weren’t established, Bezeq’s IT team detected reduced CPU demand, helping it squeeze maximum compute power from existing resources.

“Data warehouses are treasure troves of information that telcos need to stay ahead of the competition, but making them run efficiently can be a challenge,” said Hugo Georlette, CEO at BeLocal, an IT solutions provider in Herzilya which deployed Bezeq’s new storage architecture. “Excelero gives them a readily-extensible platform from which it can grow."

"The winners in the new telecoms landscape will be those forward-thinking organisations that are most effective in extracting information from their data," said Lior Gal, Excelero co-founder and CEO. "We are extremely proud that Excelero’s NVMesh is exceeding the requirements of Bezeq's data warehouse and enabling the company to run its day-to-day operations with an important competitive edge.” 

"For innovative and evolving telecom companies, choosing the right networking hardware becomes critical to achieving the fastest and most an efficient access to storage," said Arik Kol, Sr. Director Ecosystem at Mellanox Technologies. "Deploying Excelero NVMesh together with Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet switches and ConnectX adapters enables customers like Bezeq to take full advantage of the benefits of NVMe flash, NVMe over Fabrics, and the Excelero NVMesh storage solution."