Services
The client is a leading telecommunications and information services company in Australia, providing broadband, voice, and wireless services to consumers and businesses. Its main objective was to upgrade the (billing and revenue management) BRM suite with zero downtime.
The client was challenged by a significant time crunch, as the live site needed to be completed in a small outage window of 12 hours involving connectivity testing with 28 interfaces. In addition, we, at Mphasis, also had to address the following issues on priority.
• Complex software customization of billing and rating functionality from billing and revenue management (BRM) 6.5 to BRM 7.4 platform
• The time gap in database schema between existing and target versions was 10 years
• Difficult data migration and transformation from BRM 6.5 to 7.4 schema and conversion of Oracle 9i to 11g. Oracle GoldenGate had also never been tested to align with such a complex transformation. As a result, the tool required customization of database schema and performance tuning to align with a huge database size of 15TB
• Massive testing effort of over 1200 test cases. It involved complex stress and volume testing on seven servers involving clustering (RAC)
To overcome these challenges, our team comprising of expert BRM architects, subject matter experts, and developers devised the following solutions:
• Upgraded billing application from Oracle BRM v6.5 to Oracle BRM v7.4
• Provided hardware infrastructure which would support expected usage growth for at least three years, following deployment
• Upgraded operating system to Solaris 10
• Upgraded DBMS software to Oracle Database 11g Release 2
• Re-engineered the billing application and its database structure to suit the new version of Oracle BRM
• Ensured successful data migration and completed the following types of testing: Interface, functional, stress and volume, data migration, and operations
Our innovative solutions allowed us to reduce upgrade time by one-fifth. Domain expertise in BRM upgrades and GoldenGate tool allowed us to achieve near-zero down time. The client also gained the following benefits:
• Achieved on-time delivery of a complex 13,500 man days project
• Delivered trouble-free upgrades even though there was a 10-year difference between database schema of existing and new versions
• Ensured near zero downtime—with the actual downtime just under one hour—which in turn catalyzed business continuity and minimal upgrade time
• Deployed source and target systems in parallel for comparative validations
• Ensured smooth deployment during the stipulated 12 hours outage with minimum impact to business
• Stabilized the application within 2.5 days of deployment without any major issues and achieved business as usual (BAU) within 48 hours
• Minimized bugs with comprehensive testing