Success Stories
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Chooses NetApp for its Mission-Critical SAP Applications
CUSTOMER PROFILE
KEY HIGHLIGHTS Industry Media/communications The challenge Build a scalable infrastructure for two business-critical mySAP™ applications. The solution Fujitsu’s FlexFrame solution was selected for its scale-out capabilities, with the underlying storage systems from NetApp: FAS3050HA for the data center, FAS3020 for disk-to-disk backup, and FAS3020 at the DR site. Benefits • Reduced TCO via easy manageability • Achieved rock-solid availability and business continuity • Reduced complexity and cost • Gained ability to respond quickly to changes in the business environment
Founded in 1838, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL) is India’s largest media house, publishing such market-leading newspapers as The Times of India, The Economic Times, Mumbai Mirror, Navbharat Times, and The Maharashtra Times and such magazines as Femina and Filmfare. The Times of India and The Economic Times are the world’s largest circulated English and economic dailies, respectively. BCCL also holds major interests in Internet and e-commerce concerns (Indiatimes), FM radio (Radio Mirchi), retail (Planet M), television (Zoom), and event management (Miss India, Business Leadership Summits, etc.). The company has a presence in the cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkatta, Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, and Kochi. THE CHALLENGE Before 2006, BCCL was running SAP ® R3 and prepress applications on IBM AIX servers and a Shark storage system. As business needs grew, the IBM infrastructure could not keep pace with BCCL’s evolving scalability and performance needs. In addition, management and maintenance costs were high, the system was overloaded, backup/ restore processes were taking longer than acceptable times, DR functionality was rudimentary, and there was no seamless upgrade path.
This situation called for a complete new look at BCCL’s Times Response and prepress IT infrastructure. BCCL had to build a foundation for business growth while assuring rock-solid availability, since any downtime in the system would translate to lost revenue opportunities. THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS NetApp® storage had been widely accepted at BCCL for the company’s ePaper, digital photo archive, and editorial applications. BCCL had already seen firsthand the value that NetApp delivered to the media house in terms of performance and availability, seamless scalability, industry-best storage utilization, and multiprotocol support (SAN, iSCSI, NAS) that reduced complexity and costs. For the Times Response and prepress IT infrastructure decision, BCCL called for competitive bids from IBM, Sun, and Fujitsu/NetApp. Times Response is the revenue-generating operation for BCCL. All ad sales for the group’s media properties are processed by this department. The system load and the way it varies during peak times such as festivals, New Year, and so on are such that even five minutes of downtime can lead to lost revenue opportunities. In fact, the BCCL site is probably the largest and busiest SAP site in the media business worldwide.
“ We believe that NetApp’s storage systems are playing an important role in enhancing our competitive edge in the market. NetApp has provided us operational advantages while controlling cost of ownership.” IT Team Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.
The prepress application, from PPI, paginates based on the output of the Times Response system, before the issue is sent to Editorial. The prepress system is critical to ensuring that the group’s publications are brought out on time, every single day. Says the BCCL IT team, “We were building a foundation for future business growth and simply had to get the infrastructure decision right.” Key decision-making criteria were: • Backup and DR functionality had to be robust and efficient; high availability was essential, as was simplified backup and DR processes • Scalability, to support business growth seamlessly • Flexibility to adapt, in real time, to changes in business needs • Manageability • Cost of ownership After a detailed comparative analysis and reference checks, BCCL selected Fujitsu FlexFrame and storage from NetApp for running the Times Response and prepress systems.
The fact that simplified backup/restore and replication functionality is built into all NetApp platforms (requiring only a software license for activation) was an important consideration for BCCL. NetApp Snapshot™ was already proven in BCCL’s Editorial department, where frequent Snapshot copies (which could be taken without degrading system performance) provided excellent RPO. In addition, the RAID-DP® feature built into all NetApp systems provided protection against double disk failures. These features were relevant because high data availability is nonnegotiable in a nonstop revenue-generating and prepress operation. It helped, of course, that the FlexFrame solution was also designed to be highly available. Seamless scalability was another critical parameter that influenced BCCL’s decision. FlexFrame was capable of scaling performance not only within a single node but also across multiple nodes. With its single unified architecture across all storage platforms, NetApp’s systems can easily scale storage performance or capacity with data-in-place upgrades. In a nonstop operation, scaling performance or capacity must be a nondisruptive process, and the FlexFrame/NetApp solution delivered on this requirement.
Another important parameter was flexibility: the ability to reallocate compute and storage resources depending on business needs at a given point in time. Considering the real-time nature of the media business, changes in business needs were bound to occur frequently. In such a scenario, BCCL had to be able to change compute and storage resource allocations across various sub systems, all without having to follow complex and time-consuming processes. The FlexFrame/NetApp solution offered better capabilities to meet this need. Says the BCCL IT team, “As we progressed through the decision-making process, it became increasingly clear that the FlexFrame/ NetApp solution came closest to our expectations. It had all the characteristics that matched our vision of a rock-solid, scalable, and dynamic infrastructure.” KEY BENEFITS TO BCCL The first visible benefit came when migration from the old to the new systems took one month flat. The FlexFrame/NetApp solution’s flexibility, ease of management, and built-in business continuity capability kept BCCL from having to go through time-consuming and painful processes to migrate its systems.
Production Site
Disaster Recovery Site
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NetApp FAS 3050HA with FC Drives Fibre Channel Connection
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NetApp FAS 3020 with ATA Drives
NetApp FAS 3020 with FC Drives
Gigabit Ethernet Connection
Fibre Channel Switch
Gigabit Ethernet Switch
Figure 1) BCCL’s production and disaster recovery environments. BCCL deployed flexible, unified NetApp storage to support both the SAP production systems and the business continuance environment for high availability and enhanced performance.
System performance also significantly improved after migration to the new architecture. Efficient disk-to-disk backup processes and granular replication capabilities have enabled BCCL’s IT team to deliver on demanding availability SLAs while easing the IT staff’s management and administrative burden. “We believe that NetApp’s storage systems are playing an important role in enhancing our competitive edge in the market. Be it online properties, content archive, editorial, ad sales, or pre-press, NetApp has provided us operational advantages while controlling cost of ownership,” says the BCCL IT team. KEY LESSON BCCL is unique in the sense that it placed its bets on adaptive computing when no precedents existed in the media business in India. Concludes the BCCL IT team, “We believe that monolithic, mainframe-like compute/ storage architectures do not meet the needs of a growing business. A flexible, dynamic infrastructure that can be built with midrange systems is the way to go.”
FUTURE PLANS BCCL proposes to implement a SAP archival solution (AXSOne) in the future. NetApp’s unified storage architecture means that BCCL can do so using the existing FAS platform, without having to invest in a separate storage silo, leading to better ROI.
SOLUTION COMPONENTS NetApp Products NetApp FAS3050HA, 18TB 2 x FAS3020, 12TB SnapVault ®, SnapRestore®, SnapMirror ®
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