i2i Systems Leverages Volt to Support One of Turkey’s Biggest Telco Providers

Challenge: Processing Transactions with Minimal System Downtime

In 2019, one of the biggest telecommunication companies in Turkey, a company with 25 million subscribers, put out an RFP seeking a vendor that could deliver an online charging system that was highly available, highly scalable, geo-redundant, and capable of processing 100,000 transactions concurrently in 30 milliseconds or less. 

i2i Systems had been using Oracle TimesTen as an in-memory database, but as an older solution, that product couldn’t meet all of these requirements. Plus, it was getting quite expensive.

“It was very difficult for us to achieve those requirements with Oracle,” explains Mennan Tekbir, Principal Solutions Architect at i2i Systems.

Results: Achieve High Availability With No Service Loss

The choice to build its online charging system on top of Volt proved to be a shrewd one. Not only did i2i Systems win the business, but they’ve also kept the customer delighted ever since. 

“When we started the program, we weren’t sure we could meet those SLAs,” Tekbir continues. “With Volt, we’ve exceeded them. If we chose another in-memory database, I’m not sure if we could have achieved the high availability, geo-redundancy, or latency requirements.”

i2i Systems’ online charging system integrates with network nodes that are responsible for managing voice, data, and SMS traffic. All nodes come to the online charging system to check in real time whether the subscriber has enough credit to make a call; if not, the subscriber is charged in real time. Since all subscriber data — including phone numbers (MSISDN, IMSI numbers), subscriber & product characteristics and products purchased — subscriber balances and credit data needs to be accessed very quickly and reliably to make this work, all of this information is stored in-memory in Volt.

Thanks to Volt, i2i Systems has been able to offer more attractive pricing compared to if they were still using Oracle TimesTen. Additionally, their online charging system can handle both postpaid and prepaid subscribers on one converged platform. Due to Volt’s active-active design, it’s also capable of meeting the availability, performance, and geo-redundancy specifications the telco customer required.

“If one server crashes, the other servers can still handle the request,” Tekbir says. “There is no service loss.”

Looking ahead, Ozdemir believes that Volt has a “very bright future.”

“It scales horizontally, you can add as many nodes as you like, and it’s highly available out of the box,” he concludes. “Any company that needs a reliable, scalable data platform with active-active geo-redundancy should select Volt.”