5G is fundamentally different from 4G, LTE, or any other network the telecommunications industry has ever seen before. It promises data rates 100x that of 4G, network latency of under 1 millisecond, supports 1 million devices/sq. km., and 99.999% availability of the network. 5G will generate data at an unprecedented velocity and immense volume. This “fast data” will fuel a wide range of data-driven services and digital business models. However, to capitalize on this opportunity, your organization needs to operationalize fast data and make informed business decisions in-event and in real-time.
In this checklist, we will enumerate the critical database components required from the new 5G database, to be able to implement and succeed in the 5G era.

• HIGH THROUGHPUT & LOW LATENCY

  5G ITU IMT-2020 specifications demand speeds up to 20 gig per second and a target latency of 1 ms. This unprecedented combination of high speed and low latency will open the flood gates on data streaming in from fixed wireless, IoT, Video on Demand, Virtual Reality, and other apps. Provisioning and completion decisions will need to scale with the new higher volumes that 5G enables. The new business models driven by 5G: Quality of Service (QoS)/Provisioning models, and opportunities to deploy new cloud microservices closer to the edge, will drive new requirements on the existing infrastructure. Legacy databases & disparate NoSQL data stores are just not capable of performing complex transactions and analysis on this high throughput data (millions of tps) at low latency (in ms).

• LINEAR SCALE

  5G networks will generate vast multitudes of streaming data from not only 5G enabled apps, but also from the network, subscribers, enterprise users, network operators and call processing. It would be essential for the 5G database to scale linearly at a moment’s notice while maintaining the high performance and low latency requirements all along.

• HA / DR / XDCR

  The 5G network promises a network availability of 99.999%. If the network goes down even for a second, the microservices / apps, along with the consumer subscribers / enterprise users that rely on them, incur significant revenue loss, and, in some IoT and healthcare use cases, even potential human life could be lost. The database powering the apps and microservices is expected to have High Availability (HA) especially across multiple geographies (XDCR), and Disaster Recovery (DR) built-in. Additionally, 5G’s latency requirements are causing CSPs to move to active-active XDCR, as the speed of light makes a single large data center too slow for end users.

• VIRTUALIZATION / CLOUD / DOCKERIZATION

  The scale, elasticity, agility, responsiveness and rich software functionality required for 5G microservices can only be achieved in the cloud. Lower CAPEX & OPEX is an additional benefit of being in the cloud. Today NFV is done on Virtual Machines (VMs), and VMs will continue to be utilized in a 5G environment. Containers will shoulder the bulk of the load in building and deploying 5G microservices. Containers offer the agility to spin up or spin down microservices and enable a DevOps culture that is necessary in the 5G era. Containers can also be easily orchestrated using open-source tools such as Google’s Kubernetes. The modern 5G database needs to seamlessly work in the cloud, and also be orchestrated in a containerized environment.

Read the full, 9-page copy of this checklist and report, 5G Requirements: Executive Summary & Checklist. Or let us know in the comments below — what are your top concerns for implementing 5G?