Virtualisation at Comfone

Technology moves fast at Comfone.

During the first half of 2020, Comfone engineers migrated Comfone's core DRAs and core STPs to a new generation platform.

Performing four large-scale "hot swap" operations in less than 6 months requires thorough preparation, Swiss timing, precision, execution, and bright solutions when things do not happen as planned. The last point is the most important – nothing stops a motivated team of great engineers. This is part of Comfone's DNA.

This new platform is fully virtualised, and in this blog I will be discussing virtualisation: the strengths, the challenges and how we overcome them to offer our customers more.

The benefits of virtualisation

Comfone has strategically invested in virtualisation for the many advantages it offers, such as:

• auto restart upon hardware failure
• vmotion for maintenance and upgrades
• snapshots and restore
• easy scaling

Virtualisation: the strengths 

Virtualisation is large step forward, as it streamlines the renewal of hardware, upgrade of operating systems and deployment of applications. It also helps to widen the possibility of quickly restoring and recovering a failed system.

Virtualisation: the challenges

Virtualisation can also turn into a headache. This can be a problem, particularly when systems begin affecting each other, storage IOs become bottlenecks or when stretched layer networking becomes a source of issue rather than a solution.

How Comfone overcomes these challenges 

Comfone's IT architecture considers these aspects and operates "real time" clusters (signalling nodes, Key2roam Hub systems) and "data" clusters (clearing nodes, DMS).

We heavily invest in geo-distributing our systems to provide regional services for a more robust offer. We are also in the planning stages of additional distribution sites in both Asia and the Americas to further improve and expand our supply.

On the technology side, we are already looking how containerised applications can further reduce the maintenance effort of our infrastructure and applications.

Why we are different 

At Comfone, we collect billions of data records to feed our Pulse applications. We operate our own software to aggregate, correlate and produce intelligent data lakes for the roaming business.

The terabytes of data produced by those processes are stored in massive well-distributed database clusters, all operated on our virtualised infrastructure with extremely fast SSD storage.

Comfone has heavily invested in data security, and stores data in a fully owned private cloud. We are fully GDPR compliant with a yearly external certification. This provides our customers with the peace of mind that we take data security extremely seriously, and take every possible measure to ensure this.

Data: the challenges and opportunities 

 Despite this vital work and huge effort, data remains data unless one knows what to do with it.

Through our own Key2roam Platform, we offer complete integration in the roaming business, from the deepest signalling elements up to the management of wholesale agreements. This complete knowledge of the entire roaming process makes us a natural partner for producing the technology and expertise to help you to get more from your data.

Trust us when we say that most operators have untapped potential to do more with their data. We have seen it! Comfone can help you to make more money out of your data through our intelligently designed suite of DMS applications, utilising the IPX data records, TAP files in clearing and harnessing the power of the DMS to create smart solutions.

Are you interested in finding out more?

Get in touch today to find out how Comfone can help you to use your data to monetise your business.