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How It Works: Flash memory for billing applications, real-time network monitoring

Eric Herzog of Violin Memory explains to RCR Wireless how flash memory has disrupted the telecommunications storage market. Violin has led disruption of the memory market for telcos with five out of the 10 biggest carriers in the world using its flash memory solutions.

Herzog describes flash memory use cases including upgrades for billing systems and said that one of Violin’s customers found that their network use was going up, but billing was not. Once they re-wrote their billing software to handle the increases, they found that traditional hardware-based memory systems weren’t working for the new software, but that Violin’s flash memory did work, Herzog said — leading to an additional $140 million per year in billings on what he said was less than a $2 million investment.

Real-time network monitoring is another application where flash memory comes into play, he added.

“You have a lot of data points that are coming off of the systems in the field and you need to make sure what is working and not working,” Herzog said. He added that the systems have been reconfigured to take advantage of big data and they “are very, very sensitive to performance applications and sensitive to the overall performance of the underlying physical infrastructure their server their network and their storage” on the IT side.

This How It Works program was produced during #TC32014 held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Watch the video below and check out more How It Works videos as part of RCR’s coverage of the Telecom Council Carrier Connections event.

ABOUT AUTHOR

Kelly Hill
Kelly Hill
Kelly reports on network test and measurement, as well as the use of big data and analytics. She first covered the wireless industry for RCR Wireless News in 2005, focusing on carriers and mobile virtual network operators, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. Follow her on Twitter: @khillrcr