EMC and SenSage offer data retention fix

EMC, Intec and SenSage have joined forces to develop what they reckon is a cost effective solution for ISPs and telcos needing to deal with the requirements of the new European directive on data retention.

The directive, which has been described by critics as knee-jerk legislation, says communications companies (mobile and fixed line telcos, and ISPs) must retain huge quantities of data about all messages going through their networks.

It requires them to keep track of the name, user ID, and address of both the source and destination of the message as well as the date and time of the message, the equipment used and, in the case of a cell phone, the location of the callers.

Under the terms of the directive, companies must hang on to this information for at least six months, and up to two years. Any database must also be searchable by the police and must be tamper-proof.

EMC and SenSage say their system is capable of managing over 100 billion Call Detail Records (CDR) and will return search results within minutes.

They carried out a proof of concept simulation in which they captured two years worth of data for an imaginary telco with 10 million subscribers. The companies say the system executed un-indexed queries at more than 27.9 million records per second and obtained answers in less than seven minutes within a three month search range.

The two companies worked with legal eagles in Brussels to make sure their kit can cope with the scope of the regulations, but acknowledge that it is a tricky thing to comply with laws that have yet to be set in stone by member states.

SenSage president and CEO Jim Pflaging says he is confident the proposition will find an audience: "For service providers, this is just a cost of doing business. If a company were to use a large data warehouse/relational database solution, it could easily cost $20m to comply. We can provide a solution for between a fifth and a tenth of the cost of the traditional technology."

The companies say the solution is commercially available now and can be deployed for a client tomorrow. ®