Customer: Active Broadband Networks

"We chose Pentaho Business Analytics because of its ease of use, intuitive and powerful report designer, and Pentaho’s ability to visually integrate, manipulate and enrich data during the analytics process."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Broadband providers need easy access to this data for reporting and analytics. Network operations personnel run reports for network performance monitoring, for example, understanding when and where the network experienced congestion. In addition, network engineers and product managers analyze the data for capacity and service planning (for example, what segments of the network have been consistently congested and how does subscriber usage segment into usage tiers).
• A traditional relational database is not well-suited to storing this much data as it takes too long to write it to storage and too long to access it when performing analytics.
• Even using a specialized compression algorithm to reduce the size of usage records by a factor of 12:1, the system can easily accumulate 50-100 terabytes of network and subscriber usage data.
• In networks with millions of subscribers and a 15-minute collection interval, the Active Resource Manager needs to potentially store billions of usage records that need to be retained for up to a year.
• The company’s Active Resource Manager collects, processes and stores huge volumes of network, service and subscriber usage data via streaming data protocols, include IPDR, RADIUS accounting and IPFIX/NetFlow.
• Active Broadband is a software company that enables broadband providers to deploy usage-based service management solutions.

Pentaho Solution

• Bundled Pentaho Business Analytics with its Dynamic Broadband Service Manager because of its native integration with Cassandra and integrated platform providing reporting, analytics, dashboards and data integration.
• Selected and deployed Cassandra as the database to collect, process and store huge volumes (terabytes) of network and subscriber usage data.

Results

• There’s no need for network operators to enlist the services of specialized IT personnel or spend days or weeks hand-coding reports.
• It’s now easy for network operators to modify these reports and to create their own reports in Pentaho’s intuitive, visual design environment.
• Active Broadband provides it network operator customers with a set of pre-built reports that are bundled with the DBSM.

Why Pentaho

• Intuitive and powerful report designer
• Ease of use
• Integrated data integration and business analytics platform
• Native integration with Cassandra
• Customized OEM and big data support and services