Qvantel

Long-time Progress® OpenEdge® user Qvantel recently joined Progress’ Early Software Access Program (ESAP) to obtain access to an early release of the OpenEdge Table Partitioning feature. Headquartered in Finland, Qvantel is an international IT services company offering customized, cloud-based, critical business support systems (BSS) and consulting for ICT service providers, e-Invoicing consolidators, utilities and media companies. As part of the lead-up to the launch of Progress OpenEdge 11.4, the ESAP provides participants like Qvantel with exclusive hands-on experience with many of the new features coming in the release, including Table Partitioning, allowing them to preview how it will optimize application management and performance.

One of Qvantel’s primary services is managing the call data associated with the billing systems for major Teleco operators.  As a services provider, Qvantel is responsible for handling massive amounts of data on behalf of its clients. “Our customers process millions of calls on a daily basis. Naturally, the databases that store that call data grow substantially – we are talking about terabytes and terabytes of data,” explains Matti Kiviranta, Senior Database Administrator for Qvantel. “The costs associated with managing those databases are enormous.”

Each country within the European Union also maintains strict retention regulations in regards to either how long the call data must be stored or when the data must be deleted. To comply with these rules, Qvantel has dedicated valuable resources to manually manage, move, archive and delete the information on a continuous basis.

“As a services provider, everything we can do to improve performance and reduce costs will impact our bottom line,” says Kiviranta. “The new OpenEdge Table Partitioning feature has the potential to reduce our costs, improve performance and free up our engineers to work on projects that will have a more significant impact on the business.”

Kiviranta expects that Qvantel will initially partition data according to date range. But he says there are a number of other options they can explore, such as partitioning by country or by data retention requirements.

Qvantel anticipates a number of potential benefits with the OpenEdge 11.4 Table Partitioning feature. “The ability to partition data means we can automatically move older, read-only data away from the live data in compliance with individual country regulations. That will save us time and money in regards to our own resources. And it will improve the performance of our live data,” says Kiviranta. 

Pekka Nurminen, Services Director for Qvantel, says the ability to reduce their costs will benefit both Qvantel and its customers. “With Table Partitioning, we will have the ability to manage our data far more efficiently. That will reduce our own internal costs and, in turn, enable us to keep our pricing lower for our customers and prospects. That would certainly give us a competitive edge in this market.”

Table Partitioning will also significantly reduce Qvantel’s backup times. “We have some system backups that are taking 50+ hours. And other databases are so large that they are essentially in a continuous backup state,” explains Nurminen. “The ability to partition read-only data will dramatically reduce the amount of information we have to back up. We don’t know exactly what the improvement will be with Table Partitioning, but we know it will be tremendous. The ESAP is letting us get our hands on the feature now and begin testing it for ourselves.”

Minimizing downtime is crucial to Qvantel. Any downtime can mean a loss of tens of thousands of euros for its customers, and a loss to Qvantel as well. To ensure continuous availability, Qvantel currently maintains duplicate databases, switching between systems to perform basic maintenance and backups.  “We have had some incidents of downtime with this method,” explains Kiviranta. “With Table Partitioning, we would be able to move the majority of the readonly data to other partitions or databases, which would reduce backups of the live data and greatly minimize any downtime.”

Nurminen says Qvantel is very eager to take advantage of the new OpenEdge Table Partitioning feature. “We have been waiting for this feature for years. Now that it is a reality, we want to take advantage of it as soon as possible. We are still in the early stages of identifying how we will use Table Partitioning. But I am confident that we will see immediate benefits once we implement this new OpenEdge feature.”