Reliance Communications

Case Study

A Greenplum Success Story: Reliance Communications

Reliance turned to Greenplum and the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance to solve its large-scale data challenges.
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About Reliance Communications

Reliance Communications is the telecommunications arm of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (Reliance - ADAG), the largest private sector company in India. As the country's second-largest telecommunications company with a digital network covering over 14,000 towns and 400,000 villages, Reliance Communications has been rated among "Asia's Top 5 Most Valuable Telecom Companies." In 2007, the company's subscriber base exceeded 40 million and was growing at an annual rate of 50 percent.

Reliance Communications Challenges

The increase in demand for Reliance's services was producing explosive growth in the systems and infrastructure required to operate the business. The need to provide accurate, timely analytics to all parts of the business was becoming more acute. One area of the company that required rapid delivery of relevant analysis was Reliance’s Law Enforcement Department. Loading a day’s worth of data into the system was taking on the order of 2 to 3 hours.

Greenplum Solution

The company selected the S1004 model of the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance. The S1004 integrates Greenplum Database with 4 Sunfire X4500 systems as well as a Sunfire X4200 system. As a result of deploying the S1004, the time required to turn around a request for detailed call records shrank by over 80 percent, from multiple days to a few hours. In addition to the company’s issues with information retrieval, the inability to load data into the data warehouse quickly enough was becoming increasingly problematic. Compared to Reliance’s previous database system, the Greenplum system reduced the average time to load a day’s worth of data by over 90 percent, from 2 hours to under 10 minutes. Reliance is now expanding to 4x the number of systems for additional data marts.