Comcast Xfinity Home Oracle Scalability and Replication Architecture

Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is the largest American multinational telecommunications and media conglomerate and the second-largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world by revenue, and is also the largest pay-TV company, the largest cable TV company, and largest home Internet service provider in the United States.

Comcast offers Xfinity Home, a home security and smart home automation solution with live video streaming.

A division of iControl Networks (now part of Comcast) built and provides operational support for the software system that is the foundation of the Comcast Xfinity Home security and home automation product. iControl engineered their “Converge” application to store data in the Oracle RDBMS, with distributed active-active replication between Oracle databases provided by Oracle GoldenGate.

RhinoSource assisted the iControl team with the design and testing of Oracle Partitioning for the Converge home security system schema to allow the exponentially growing amount of IoT data to be efficiently stored, retrieved and purged when expired. RhinoSource created the complex automation scripts that run daily to maintain the system’s Oracle partitions and drop expired IoT data as well as the online partitioning conversion scripts that must run against the live, online database without causing disruptions to the always-on application.

RhinoSource also designed, configured and tested Oracle GoldenGate replication to support a distributed Active-Active Oracle database architecture required to support the multi-region deployment of the Converge system.

When a region of the US was hit with a rash of false alarms and sensor outages, RhinoSource conducted statistical analyses on Converge sensor data that correlated the outages with freezing temperatures, leading to the conclusion that a bad batch of sensor batteries had been installed which were the root cause of the false alarms.

RhinoSource also conducted analyses of meshed sensor behaviors that helped the engineering team debug sensor firmware and fix issues.

Finally, RhinoSource provided a design review for an Apache Cassandra-based Cluster Location Service, which allows the Converge application to scale across multiple active-active data centers.