MegaFon Swaps Out Oracle DBMS for Nexign Nord in its BSS Stack

Being one of the largest mobile operators in Eastern Europe, MegaFon needed to ensure its infrastructure’s independence from foreign software. One of the major challenges in achieving this goal was replacing Oracle DBMS in its BSS stack, as most of MegaFon’s core business systems were traditionally running on Oracle. The operator couldn’t continue relying on the mission-critical software without a development roadmap and reliable support from the vendor.

MegaFon and Nexign worked together on several large products, including migrating the operator’s eight subsidiaries and the subscriber base to a unified BSS platform. MegaFon's activities on replacing Oracle in its BSS stack started several years ago when the communications service provider (CSP) first began to experiment with PostgreSQL in some minor product installations. However, the results of pilot projects quickly showed that vanilla PostgreSQL could not support critical business systems, as it did not meet a number of key requirements of a Tier-1 CSP, including:

• Technical support: The CSP could not run critical business services without 24/7 technical support for the core DBMS.
• Strong security management: Vanilla PostgreSQL did not meet MegaFon's information security requirements, such as password policy and user access management.
• Fault tolerance: A reliable solution was needed to support the execution of DRP (Disaster Recovery Planning) in a geo-redundant infrastructure.

Therefore, MegaFon's team began to analyze the market of DBMSs based on PostgreSQL. Ultimately, the company selected Nexign Nord. This choice was determined by three factors:     

• Best value for money: Nexign suggested significantly lower licensing and support costs than its competitors in the market. The Nexign team also extended technical support to Nexign’s other open source products that MegaFon used along with Nexign Nord.  
• Fast implementation: Nexign demonstrated its readiness to quickly customize Nexign Nord to meet MegaFon's specific security and fault tolerance requirements. For example, changes to Nexign Nord's functionality to fit the CSP's product could be implemented in 2-3 months on average.
• Advanced technical support: The product could be delivered with extended technical support, including 24/7 consulting and operation, or without it. MegaFon, which has a 24/7 expert line on its side, chose the second option.

Nexign Nord is a reliable and scalable enterprise-grade RDBMS. It assures high performance, stability, scalability, and high availability, which are required for mission-critical applications. In addition, Nexign Nord provides ease of installation and a high data protection level. It also helps decrease TCO due to low system requirements and the ability to deploy the solution on isolated servers.

The Nexign team extended the security and user management functionality of Nexign Nord to meet MegaFon's requirements, as well as the domestic information security requirements of the regulatory authorities. In particular, now the product allows creating a role-based access matrix, storing password history with customizable depth, and performing additional password checks.

Two Migration Paths

During the analytics phase, MegaFon considered two ways to migrate from Oracle.

1. Replicating the logic of Oracle operation in PostgreSQL. In this case, the software code is stored as close to the data as possible, minimizing delays in transferring information between the application and the database. However, with this approach, it will be very difficult to reduce downtime for installing new software versions and scheduling maintenance in the future. At the same time, the cost of support increases due to high requirements for administrator skills, and any software changes are limited by the database storage size.
2. Moving the logic from the database to the application. On the one hand, this approach gives more opportunities for scaling and allows building a DBMS-agnostic IT architecture. However, on the other hand, it requires allocating large volumes of computing resources. MegaFon decided to follow this way. The team also agreed that if migrating a particular application from Oracle was too costly, it should have been changed entirely.

The CSP developed and implemented a plan to migrate all key business systems by increasing complexity: from small to the most voluminous, from lightly loaded to highly loaded. To synchronize data between Oracle and Nexign Nord and guarantee fast rollback without data loss in case of accidents, the teams used the Russian analog of Oracle GoldenGate — Nexign Data Integrator. The first migration to Nexign Nord — migration of the financial product management system in billing — took place in 2022.

 

The results of the migration projects with MegaFon, one of the leaders in the telecom market, have confirmed that Nexign Nord is ready for use in highly loaded systems, such as BSS, both in terms of the high performance and reliability of the product itself and the level of expertise of the Nexign team. The Nord DBMS is suitable for large and medium-sized companies that are migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL, using PostgreSQL or looking for a new database to develop their solutions.

Maxim Nartov

Chief Business Officer at Nexign