News

posted on 19 April 2008 17:21

HP's DRAGON system for telcos under government call data retention mandates has been extended to better integrate with lawful intercept systems and support Linux to reduce captial costs.

Telecom operators world-wide are being required by governments to collect and retain call data for months or years to help combat terrorism, organised crime and drug trafficking.

HP's Data Retention and Guardian Online (DRAGON) product was designed for this and enables operators to capture the potentially huge volumes of voice and data traffic on their networks, retain it for the months or years mandated, and then retrieve selected records – almost in real time, HP says – when requested by law enforcement agencies. There are security features to protect individual privacy.

HP has added:-
- Integration with lawful intercept systems with better front-end ability to manage requests for retained data and lawful intercept.
- More configuration flexibility for multinational companies, mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) and to support outsourcing.
- Red Hat Linux support to reduce capital expenditures (by using, HP says, its BladeSystem servers). This makes DRAGON more affordable for smaller environments. 
- Grid storage capability for highly scalable, low-cost storage as an alternative to a relational database.
- Extra data integrity features for improved security and protection of subscriber privacy.  The system can detect a change or change attempt in the audit and logging areas and create an alarm if this violates a control rule.

HP says DRAGON performance is good: using a database of 20 billion call detail records -about six months of data for an average operator - it consistently delivered 50 second response times. In a stress test of more than 100 simultaneous queries, response time was under 5 minutes, again consistently so. 

Mike Davis, an Ovum senior analyst, said nice things about DRAGON: “European operators are now moving forward to comply with legislation in their respective countries. These deployments can be complex, particularly where an operator is present in more than one country, and they require many sophisticated capabilities beyond the obvious storage resources. HP’s DRAGON approach is comprehensive and potentially the most mature offering in this arena.”

Naturally there is a standards body working in this area. It is called ETSI and is developing standards for the handling of retained data and for the integration of operators’ data retention systems with law enforcement agencies. The idea is that fewer operators will be needed to deal with law enforcement agency requests. HP says it will incorporate such functionality as soon as standards are formalised.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}