Forum Discussion

AlexNtowGH's avatar
AlexNtowGH
Level 4
9 years ago

Call Detail Record (CDR)

Hi there,

has anyone of you had some experience with CDR's.

CDR's are Telco style data sets, which describe calls placed by a customer. A call detail record contains metadata – containing data fields that describe a specific instance of a telecommunication transaction, but does not include the content of that transaction, according to Wikipedia.

Depending (on the no of fields captured) on the telco's definition, these files could be smaller or bigger. They are mostly zipped. 

I am yet to understand a bit more about it, but the questions is can Di be used to reduce the amount of primiary storage consumed here.

Any comments/pointers will be appreciated.

Thanks

Data Insight
Information Governance
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    Moderator
    9 years ago

    DI is by and large a reporting tool. It does not move data across storage devices. If you looking to offload some of the old CDRs to cheaper storage there are multiple options available.

    If it's Unix then by using multi-volume file systems with VxFS/VxVM (InfoScale Storage) you can set up rules to automatically migrate older files to volumes with cheaper storage whilst maintaining a single file system from the application perspective.

    On Windows, Enterprise Vault System Archiving can be used to achieve similar results.

  • ManojChanchawat's avatar
    ManojChanchawat
    Level 3
    9 years ago

    Hi Alex, 

    As the other user (mouse**) said, you can use other Veritas Solution to cater your storage reduction. If you consider the archiving option, then it will be like done via File System archiving. Do remember, that CDR often are very small files, so the kind of advantage you will see via EV, very much depend on the average size of the CDR's. You will surely get the benefits of rich indexing for searching purpose. 

    I recently heard of another interesting use case for CDR, where telco organization want to reduce space beyond compression or migration of CDR's - they want to single instance it. They also want to do data mining on top of it. In case you are also looking for same, let me know. 

    ~Manoj

    • AlexNtowGH's avatar
      AlexNtowGH
      Level 4
      9 years ago

      Manoj,

      definitely your solution will be worth looking at, kindly let me know the details. In my case single instancing is one of the requirement, but apart from that there are purging, compression, archiving in the picture. So a bit more complex.

      thanks and looking forward to hear from you.

      Cheers

      • ManojChanchawat's avatar
        ManojChanchawat
        Level 3
        9 years ago

        Hi Alex, 

         

        The File System Archiving (FSA) option archives the CDR file like any other file and includes indexing of the data and metadata. FSA don't treat CDR file differently. it archives the whole file based on certain rules and parameters and will store the contents in the archive. This will go through regular Enterprise Vault Compression to compress the archived files. Lastly, it will remove the original CDR file from the primary storage and store it in the archive. Indexing will help in searching the content. DataInsight and FSA together will help driving the information management use case, where via DataInsight, you can archive the CDR file based on certain criteria. 

        The second option, which is not there in the product as of now, is single instancing on the content of the file.  This is not a block level deduplication, but it will be content specific. This is not there in Enterprise Vault product as of now. 

        ~Manoj

    • AlexNtowGH's avatar
      AlexNtowGH
      Level 4
      9 years ago

      Manoj,

      thanks for that you reply. So if i understand, EV FSA can do the archiving, but prior to that we need to determing which CDR's to archive, since CDR are structured data (correct me if i am wrong?),  we will need something like DI that classifies structured data. 

      My customer mentioned that they're CDR were in a database, so structured.

      I will like to hear your comments on this.

      Are there any whitepaper and customer references for EV for CDR archiving?

      Thanks

      • ManojChanchawat's avatar
        ManojChanchawat
        Level 3
        9 years ago

        Hi Alex, 

        Sorry for the delay in response.
        So if CDR is in any structured format like a database, EV FSA is not the solution. EV FSA is an archiving solution for flat file types. I have seen CDR samples in one of the customer environments and they were flat text files with a defined format (which I was calling as a structure earlier). If thats the case, these flat files can be archived through EV FSA. The archiving of files can be triggered directly in EV or can be done via Data Insight, as per policy. Via Data Insight, you can get deep insight into access patterns, metadata & ownership info of these files as well. 

        If CDR is in the database, then you need a different solution, for which EV or DI may not help. 

        In case if any of your customer is having CDR as a flat file, please refer to any of the EV FSA archiving whitepaper - Just google it. We dont have specific whitepaper for CDR as such, but any EV FSA whitepaper (for text files) will solve your purpose.