Scaling storage performance using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP with Amdocs

Amdocs specializes in deploying and managing mission-critical telecom infrastructure, helping its customers accelerate their cloud migrations. Billing systems, which process millions of consumer transactions daily, must operate with near-perfect uptime and low latency. Telecom billing workloads demand exceptionally high throughput and I/O operations per second (IOPS), often generating massive processing loads from single servers during peak billing cycles. The batch processing nature of billing workflows creates intense, concentrated I/O activity during specific periods. And as the system processes and stores millions of transaction records, the ratios of write operations continue to increase.

Billing infrastructure directly impacts revenue and service delivery, so billing systems must be architected to achieve extremely low recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). Because an Availability Zone (AZ) can fail or become unavailable, Multi-AZ deployments are essential for migrating telecom workloads to the cloud. Billing workloads also process vast numbers of small transaction files with deep directory structures, creating metadata-intensive operations that can challenge traditional cloud storage approaches.

To migrate billing workloads, Amdocs needed a solution that could deliver quick results through a lift and shift and gradually transform the system after becoming operational in the cloud. So, the company used Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Supporting the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) block storage protocol, the service can deliver the performance that billing workloads require while maintaining Multi-AZ protection.

“Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP goes above and beyond to offer unique features for cloud storage, such as iSCSI for block storage support,” says Octavian Rotaru, principal technical architect at Amdocs. “We used this feature to reduce latency while maintaining Multi-AZ data availability for our production deployments.”

To maximize the performance capabilities of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Amdocs designed and implemented a storage architecture that is based on the iSCSI block storage functionality. The team configured each high-IOPS server to use one or multiple Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file systems. Each file system is split into multiple volumes, and one iSCSI block device is created from each volume. Amdocs creates volume groups on the server side and stripes data across four to eight iSCSI block devices from the same file system. This way, the company can process single-file I/O operations as complete units and distribute multiblock operations evenly across all storage devices.

The configuration needed careful attention to network bandwidth to achieve the required results. Amdocs selected high performance Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide secure and resizable compute capacity. This network-optimized approach empowered the team to fully harness the performance capabilities of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. As a result, the read throughput can reach up to 6 GBps and the write throughput up to 2.1 GBps in regions where second-generation Multi-AZ file systems are available.

“Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP has empowered us to deploy mission-critical workloads in the cloud and to meet the demanding performance requirements of our customers,” says Rotaru. “At the same time, the service provides resilience across Availability Zones and reduces our storage costs.” Amdocs achieved a maximum throughput of 12 GBps by using Amazon EC2 instances with 100 GBps ethernet bandwidth.

“With the Multi-AZ deployment option in Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we can achieve an RPO near zero and an RTO of less than 60 seconds,” says Rotaru. “So, our operations aren’t affected by major disruptions, and there’s no additional overhead for us to worry about.” The service’s built-in data reduction algorithms delivered storage efficiency savings of 75–80 percent. These exceptional results encouraged Amdocs to deploy all high-throughput application file systems for the billing system on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.

Using the iSCSI capability in Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Amdocs can effectively scale Multi-AZ block performance for high performance workloads. The solution requires no custom development, and the iSCSI support delivers the block storage performance that telecom applications need to operate at enterprise scale.

Therefore, Amdocs was able to migrate critical telecom workloads to the cloud safely and with almost no operational disruption. In doing so, the company provided a blueprint for other businesses that seek to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining performance and reliability. With this foundation in place, Amdocs plans to apply the same approach to other telecom deployments under assessment.