Supported by
Vol 1 Issue 3 Dilip Patil General Manager Digital Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.
CIO
Insights
Building a stable IT infrastructure for the Indian films business Yash Raj Films gains archival capabilities to cater to a growing film catalogue
Company: Yash Raj Films Pvt.Ltd. Industry: Arts, Entertainment & Media Country: Mumbai, India Employees: 250 Website: www.yashrajfilms.com Business need Yash Raj Films needed a single, scalable solution to store their catalog film footage in a digital format that would guarantee availability of content and specific footage whenever required by various business touch points. Solution The studio deployed an archival solution using a Dell™ EqualLogic storage array to ensure instant access to the studio’s entire film content in various digital formats. Benefits • Entertainment company secures film archive through scalable storage solution • Provides protection for entire film catalogue • Snapshot feature saves time through restoring specific film footage • Open standards work seamlessly with film industry solutions • Scales to meet the studio’s growing catalogue Solutions featured • Storage solutions • Server
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“We now have the ability to integrate the digital asset management software with our Dell EqualLogic storage solution, and this interoperability isn’t available on other solutions. Using our storage array we can automate the tagging process and eliminate what was a time consuming and manual task. Open standards support continued innovation within our company in the content we can provide to consumers.” Dilip Patil General Manager, Digital, Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.
CIO
Insights Yash Raj Films Pvt.Ltd. (YRF), the only privately owned film studio in India, started out as a film-making company in 1970. Today, YRF has most enviable film catalogue, including the highest grossing movies in the Indian entertainment business.
“I have been in this industry for 17 years and worked with almost every technology provider. The level of support we receive from Dell is really impressive. They really take care of us through their personalized approach and go out of their way to ensure we have seamless access to our film archive.” Dilip Patil, General Manager, Digital, Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.
Over the years, YRF has widened its horizon into home entertainment by marketing and distributing DVDs, VCDs and Blu-ray discs around the world. Always a step ahead of the changes taking place in the entertainment industry, YRF has plans to scale up their production output every year and grow their existing catalogue of 55 films.
the company greater flexibility to expand the distribution of their films and film footage over multiple media platforms, the company needed a solution to archive their catalogue. Dilip Patil, Senior Manager, Digital and Systems, Yash Raj Films Pvt.Ltd., explains, “With the increasing number of digital platforms available through the internet and mobile technology, and
Archiving films for future generations With YRF producing between 5 to 8 films per year, the company’s growing archive of films was being stored on a variety of devices including servers, tape drives, and HDDs. With the digitization of content giving
growing global interest in the Indian film industry, our films are being distributed and watched more than ever before. To meet this demand we needed a single solution capable of archiving our expanding film catalog for future audiences.” YRF considered solutions from HP, Isilon, IBM, and Dell. The studio
wanted a dedicated storage solution that would ensure archived films remained highly available, and deliver reliable data protection. “If we lose footage due to hard drive failure or disk corruption, then the entire film project could be lost. This would be an enormous cost to the company and would also detrimentally impact on our distributors and audience. We need to guarantee to our studio that all film and film assets are protected,” says Patil. With the final film being stored on high-resolution files, all the digital assets of a film can require up to 10-15 terabytes of hard disk space. Following discussions with Dell representatives, the studio reviewed the Dell™ EqualLogic PS6500E virtualized iSCSI storage array with SATA disk drives, to archive their film catalogue. After attending demonstrations and workshops in Mumbai, YRF realized the EqualLogic storage array was the perfect fit for their needs.
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CIO
Insights Single storage solution improves responsiveness The studio now has the flexibility to access and use their archived catalog of films for a range of media projects across platforms such as YouTube, Netflix, and iTunes. With these platforms being accessible to millions of film lovers, having an easily accessible film catalogue that is searchable down to the level of a single frame is critical for ensuring global distribution
feature for the company. “A big advantage was the snapshot restoration feature of the Dell EqualLogic SAN where we could restore a single frame that may have been corrupted, rather than having to restore the entire film. That saves us a sizeable amount of time and ensures we experience no delays during the film’s promotion and distribution,” says Patil.
Previously, the studio’s film archive faced a risk of disk corruption. In addition, having no back up or redundancy in place for their server storage added to the risk. “Having fully redundant disk drives was a key feature for us because it means that if one disk drive fails, our films remain protected and all we need to do is replace the faulty disk. This technology ensures that our film catalog will remain to be enjoyed
Virtualized iSCSI Storage Array
“With our films now archived within a single location, we have the ability to expand our audience for both current and back catalog films. We can respond to requests within days now. While we used to take weeks to respond to requests, we can now respond within days, and deliver exactly what our partners and media require.”
Snapshots enable restoration of specific film footage
Dilip Patil General Manager, Digital, Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.
of YRF. Specific film files are delivered to dedicated workstations where the IT team can package the film or film clip in the appropriate format for upload, thereby ensuring maximum exposure for the entire YRF catalog.
Technology at work Services Dell™ Support Services Dell ProSupport™ Mission Critical with 4 hour Onsite Response Hardware Dell EqualLogic PS6500E
Patil explains that the ability to take snapshots and then restore specific data was a critical
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by our existing fans as well as new audiences,” says Patil. Scalability meets the needs of the studio’s growing archives Without a centralized archive, scaling storage meant the team had to predict future storage demands in advance. Purchasing additional physical storage solutions increased their data center footprint and resulted
in poor utilization of resources. “We need large volume storage to archive HD films. Being able to scale our current storage solution whenever we need enables us to maintain a unified platform for our film archives. This makes film management easier and and enables us to deliver a high level of service to our media partners who in turn receive quick access to our catalog,” comments Patil.
CIO
Insights
Open standards support innovation YRF received training from Dell and found the simplified administration of the Dell EqualLogic PS6500E storage array easy for any member of the IT team to manage. Ease of
“A big advantage was the snapshot restoration feature of the Dell EqualLogic SAN where we could restore a single frame that may have been corrupted, rather than having to restore the entire film. That saves us a sizeable amount of time and ensures we experience no delays during the film’s promotion and distribution.” Dilip Patil General Manager, Digital, Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.
management has reduced time spent on archiving from days to
ability to integrate the digital
Personalised level of support
asset management software
hours and has enabled the team
With a small number of IT staff
with our Dell EqualLogic storage
to focus on new projects. For
dedicated to the entire film
solution, and this interoperability
example, with Dell storage
studio,the team relies on Dell
isn’t available on other solutions.
ProSupport™ with Mission Critical
solutions based open standards;
Using our storage array, we can
4 hour Onsite Response service
YRF can integrate the storage
automate the tagging process
to support their storage solution
array with industry software to
and eliminate what was a time-
and keep the studio on schedule.
add metadata tags to their digital
consuming manual task. Open
Despite the expanding archive
assets and make their film catalog
standards support continued
requirements and increasing
easily searchable in response to
innovation within our company
demands from media partners,
specific industry requests. Patil
in the content we can provide to
YRF has been able to maintain the
comments, “We now have the
consumers.”
size of their IT team.
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Back to
Basics
CIO strategies for storage: Modernize data protection practices Traditional approaches to data protection are no longer enough. A strategy that thoughtfully augments your legacy infrastructure with modern data protection approaches can help reduce complexity, slash costs, and minimize risk of loss, while accelerating your organization’s time to value.
organizational risk. Clearly, traditional backup and recovery has been pushed to its limits—it can’t solve today’s problems, let alone the problems of tomorrow. Additionally it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify the cost of uncoordinated, often redundant data protection infrastructure.
The Challenge: Traditional backup and recovery pushed to the breaking point With today’s 24X7X365 operations, ensuring your information is always available and protected is more important now than ever before. However, traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’ models of weekly full backups that employ daily incremental data struggle to keep pace with the volume change range of data. This can be attributed to number and size of files and objects and lack of offpeak production hours. These challenges can cause application availability issues, sluggish network performance, missed backup windows, unreliable and incomplete data recovery, and increased costs for backup storage.
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Today, vital data is more decentralized and dispersed across multiple physical sites and device types. Remote backup to tape can be unreliable, labor intensive, and expensive to manage and secure. ‘Edge data’ backup to a central data center can bog down or exceed available WAN bandwidth causing infrequent backup operations and compromised recovery. In consolidated and virtualized environments, traditional backup doesn’t struggle—it breaks. The strain of virtual machine (VM) proliferation, data redundancy, excessive overhead and contention for share resources, need for automatic discovery, application consistency, and more granular recovery increases complexity, adds cost, and potentially increases overall
The Strategy: Modernize data protection practices A new data and information management approach, called ‘modern data protection,’ is key to keeping pace with today’s changing physical virtual-cloud environments and ensuring servers, data, and applications achieve always on availability. Augmenting or even replacing traditional solutions with modern infrastructure can help you deliver flexible, cost-effective solutions for reliable protection and fast recovery. Combining the best of traditional backup and recovery with continuity and resiliency solutions, modern data protection includes enhanced features such as compression, data deduplication, snapshots,
Back to
Basics replication, and real-time backups. Additionally, modern technologies are application and virtualization aware, with built-in intelligence to optimize protection and recovery. Modern data protection integrates with self-protecting storage. Array-based snapshots, clones, replicas, and mirrors ensure data is captured as quickly and frequently as your environment needs—and is recovered just as fast. This will help you solve the challenges of having too much data and too little time and will also enable curbing of storage and management costs. Benefits of data protection modernization • Minimized data loss • Maximum resource efficiency • Streamlined and integrated workflows • Faster, non-disruptive backups • Rapid and flexible recovery • Reliable, granular restores • Hypervisor, and cloud-optimized
Tactical Considerations: Choosing modern data protection solutions While your organization will have its own set of requirements, in general you should focus on cost efficiency, simplicity, performance, scalability, and future-readiness when architecting your data protection strategy. Here is a checklist of some top features to consider, and why: Data reduction Shrink backup storage requirements by 80% or more • Consolidates, compresses, and deduplicates to minimize the amount of data moved, managed, stored and protected • Minimizes backup storage requirements to reduce capital expenses, network bandwidth, requirements, and backup windows • Limits operational impact of backups to improve application availability
• Makes it possible to backup up more frequently, increasing number of recovery points for improved service levels Space efficient snapshots, image-level backup Achieve low-impact, near instant recovery to any RTO • Creates point-in-time copies of a full volume or set of volumes (such as hardware configuration, OS, applications, and data) and stores it in a single portable file to enable rapid whole-system recovery to
any physical or virtual system • Minimizes disruptions and downtime, network bottlenecks, and storage capacity • Policy-based automation quickly moves copies, reduces time, and complexity associated with locating and recovering data Remote replication Ensure business continuity during system or site outages • Creates an exact mirror copy
Learn more about Dell’s strategy for storage by visiting www.dellstorage.com/data-protection
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Back to
Basics of data on a local or remote system that can be mounted to rapidly recover from a failure • Provides minimal (asynchronous) to zero (synchronous) data loss environment for applications • Reduces time, costs, and data recovery efforts associated with traditional disaster recovery (DR) methods • Enables non-disruptive scheduled maintenance, DR testing, site workload reallocations, data center migrations, and consolidations Continuous Data Protection (CDP) Meet mission-critical, high-availability requirements • Captures or tracks changes to data at a file, block, or application level and immediately and automatically replicates to a secondary disk to enable recovery points from any point in time • Supports granular recovery, ranging from crash-consistent images to logical objects such as files, mail boxes, messages, and database files and logs • Eliminates protection gaps with near-zero backup windows and data loss Database-and application awareness Ease administration and ensure consistent recovery • Integrates with leading databases and applications, including Microsoft® SQL Server®, Microsoft Exchange Server®, Microsoft SharePoint®, Oracle®, SAP®, and IBM® DB2®, to enable faster time-to-deploy, simplified management, improved application performance, and availability
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Provides capabilities to group all application assets, including servers, virtual machines, and databases, into a group to manage SLAs and facilitate fast, granular restores Virtualization aware Streamline and accelerate protection of virtual environments • Integrates with leading frameworks, such as VMware® vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP), vCenter Site Recovery Management (SRM) and Microsoft® Windows Server® Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to coordinate with the data protection features in the hypervisor and management layers within virtual environments
recovery management and test Private/public cloud enabled Access cloud-based resources as destination targets • Extends data protection to store backup and archive data in secure cloud-based storage tiers and cloud-based recovery sites simply and affordably • Reduces and even eliminates the need for dedicated infrastructure
• Automates discovery and management of virtual machines
• Leverages compression and deduplication to reduce network traffic and enhance WAN performance
• Supports non-disruptive, application consistent backups and simplifies disaster
• Allows system and application recovery on cloud-based computing resources
Let Dell help you choose the right path forward Augmenting traditional data protection approaches with modern solutions, like Dell ® AppAssure, Dell Quest ® Software, Dell DR4000, and Dell SonicWALL ®, and self-protecting storage, like Dell Compellent ™, Dell EqualLogic™, and Dell PowerVault™ can help you ensure information is always available and protected, with maximum efficiency.
Learn more about Dell’s strategy for storage by visiting www.dellstorage.com/data-protection
White
Paper
Storage Solutions for Enterprise: What, How and Why
Sandeep Kulkarni Sr. Director, IT BMC Software Pune
The Heart of the Matter In 2015, nearly 56 Exabytes of storage will be sold — 4 times that sold in 2011. This will be coupled with an increase in unit shipments by 1.8 times between 2011-2015; and through 2015, storage system revenue will grow at 10% CAGR. Source: External Controller Based Disk Storage Worldwide 2012-2016 1 Q12 Update, Gartner
Cloud infrastructure — the buzzword today, stands on a three-legged stool. These three legs are compute, network fabric, and storage. Any short fall in design of any of these legs will collapse the infrastructure. While the requirements for right sizing
compute and fabric are simple to define, the storage is generally neglected. Storage solutions can never be ‘one-size-fits-all.’ There are two main types of storage solutions available — block level storage and file level storage. Block level storage is flexible and versatile and will be familiar to anyone who has worked on storage area networks. Block level storage presents itself to servers using industry standard fiber channel or iSCSI type connectivity. In common terms, it can be thought of as a hard drive in a server except that it is not in the server, but is attached to the server through connectivity mechanisms. Raw volumes are created and the operating system on the servers connects to these volumes as if they are individual hard disks. This makes block level storage usable by almost any type of application, database, and file storage. Block level storage is used most commonly with database, exchange, VMware etc. File level storage is often used to
share files with users. By creating block level based volumes and installing an operating system on it, one can share files on the system out. File level storage has very clear applications in infrastructure where sharing of the files is required. Businesses are always looking at decreasing the storage cost to lighten the management burden on IT. Though there are many solutions available in the market that claim to solve all of the storage problems, increasing storage as data grows does not scale well as an enterprise solution. Hence, it is important to have complete visibility into data growth and requirements before deciding the storage strategy. In addition, it is absolutely essential to understand business data storage requirements before investing in a potential solution for storage. To ensure the right investment is made, current storage environments need to be closely
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White
Paper observed — what files are being created, at what frequency, what is the retention period, how frequently are those accessed, how much storage these consume and so on. Using this analytical data ensures that the right technology solution is chosen and will also help in zeroing on the right vendor who will help deploy the solution that is cost effective, scalable and yet meets all your business needs.
Information is currently multiplying at a rate of over 65% each year and total data generated worldwide is projected to reach over 3 million petabytes by the year 2020. Some of the segregation of the data is done based on the following principals:
Importance of the data
Business value of the data
Constant change
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Segregation based on the above three principals will help one understand the business value of the data. The next step will be to map the business value of this data to the right type of storage solution. For example, data can be segregated into Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. In Tier 1, data is business critical and is accessed very frequently. In Tier 2, the data is not so actively used and is not business critical and in Tier 3, the files are never or very rarely used. While the market today offers a variety of the storage solutions right from high speed to low speed storage, the price is directly proportional to the speed of the disks. While having huge caches or fast SSD disks can be an excellent solution, the cost of such solutions supersedes the benefits they offer. Thus, having the right mix of cache and various speeds of disks plays important role in choosing the right level of solution. Storage economics is another important aspect of the overall storage strategy. Most of the organizations divide the cost of storage with the capacity to arrive at price per GB. However it is not just the cost of storage, but the expense to run it that constitutes the price per GB. This should include the power required to keep the storage up, data center real estate rent, fire system for the DC, maintenance contract for the hardware, the fully burdened cost of FTE supporting the infrastructure, and so on. For backup of the storage, many storage solutions implement replication technologies where the data is replicated not just across one storage location, but across multiple storages locations. Since replication
technologies use only the delta of the changed data, this typically does not add large loads to the WAN links. First time replication is the only one that utilizes WAN heavily. The market offers a slew of solutions for the above storage needs, right from NETAPPS DE duplication technology to virtual file servers. Today, solutions implement intelligent data storage by looking at business critical data and placing it automatically in the right storage based on the rules defined are also available. However, the key to selecting the right storage system, is to know your own environment, its expectations, and limitations. A checklist of a few important facets you should look for: Capacity
Scalability
Cost
Performance
Reliability
Manageability
To know more about the whitepaper or our research projects connect with us at http://cioresearchcenter.com/
Assessment
Why data breach incidents are on the rise There are several reasons for the recent increase in data vulnerability, Spiezle said. For one, cybercriminals have become sophisticated and precise by targeting specific companies. Organizations are also simply accumulating and relying on more data than ever before, increasing opportunities for a data breach.
These factors also increase the likelihood that the number and severity of breaches with resulting identity thefts will continue to grow in 2012. A well-designed plan is an essential part of regulatory compliance, demonstrating that a firm or organization is willing to take reasonable steps to protect data from abuse, Spiezle said.
Adding to these challenges is the increased use of outsourcing and cloud services. Businesses need to validate and monitor not only their own data protection strategies, but also their ‘vendors’.
The OTA guide contains best practices for securing customer data, with information on data governance and loss prevention, incident response plans and how to develop an in-house data breach prevention program, according to Babel.
“Combined, it orchestrates this‘perfect storm’ analogy that puts business data at risk,” Spiezle said.
“These best practices and recommendations are relevant to companies of all sizes -- a brickand-mortar store that handles
Privacy and Data Protection Governance in Five Steps Jinan Budge and Heidi Shey, Contributors It’s the lifeblood of your business but, as data volumes explode, it’s becoming a herculean task to protect sensitive data and prevent privacy infringements. Companies must understand the laws, regulations and standards for privacy and data protection, as well as ensure compliance with those rules. But where do you go to understand this vast landscape, especially when laws vary drastically from country to
country, and even state by state? Where do you start? And is it even your job? This legal and regulatory landscape is not going away, as much as doomsayers would like it to. In Forrester’s Data Security and Privacy Playbook, we developed a five-step privacy governance framework that enables you to deal with privacy head on, instead of waiting helplessly for harmonization and remaining paralyzed by fear.
Step 1:
Define data privacy scope Understanding the extent of your geography is the first step in knowing your compliance requirements. For example, if
customer personal information will find this guide just as relevant as a large firm that processes personal data on a global scale,” Babel said. These best practices help businesses develop data protection strategies that help minimize risk to consumers, business partners and stockholders, while increasing brand protection and the bottom line, said Spiezle. These efforts should include broader transparency and more detailed reporting requirements, from the leaders of the organization on down. “It’s fundamentally important that data stewardship, privacy and security no longer become siloed,” Spiezle said. “It really needs to be across a company’s discipline.”
your firm does business in all US states, Canada, and Mexico, you must consider all individual state laws plus two country laws and federal laws. That’s at least 50 data privacy laws in total.” In addition, definitions of personal data vary greatly In California, for example, authorities now see a ZIP code as personal data in and of itself, but other states consider it personal data only if it is in context with other data elements. Without understanding whether the data types that you deal with, and their classification, are personally identifiable information or not, it’s impossible to protect it appropriately.
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Assessment
Step 2:
Determine organizational roles and responsibilities Misinformed companies often dump privacy and data protection on the shoulders of security professionals. Since they are managing and securing data for the organization, it’s assumed that these professionals also should be responsible for keeping track of the privacy landscape and corresponding legal implications. In fact, according to Forrester Forrsight’s 2012 Security survey of 2,383 IT executives and technology decision-makers, 49 percent of security organizations today believe that they are fully responsible for managing privacy and regulations, and 77 percent believe that they are at least half responsible. Without a legal background, security professionals must distribute the accountability and involve multiple departments across the organization to ensure compliance, but be careful not to make security your next silo. One senior partner for a major consultancy illustrated the dilemma this way: “People hear the words personal data, and they assume it is IT. IT says it is security. In fact, a major part of this issue does not involve data protection, IT or security.”
To remedy this situation, consider hiring a dedicated privacy professional or chief privacy officer to ensure that compliance activities are carried out across the organization.
Step 3:
Map laws and regulations into business requirements One of the most common challenges that we hear from clients is translating this rainbow of standards into real-life requirements, controls and business practices. Because lack of harmonization is such a complex a complex issue for most organizations, Forrester recommends creating internal control mapping tools. A chief privacy officer from one of the world’s largest organizations told us that their organization recently implemented an online privacy tool and process map. By bringing together lawyers from around the world, they examined relevant legal requirements and instituted the tool directly into business processes. While reliance on humans may still be necessary at times, the tool allows projects to self-determine their requirements and only seek expensive legal help and organizational engagement in special circumstances.
Step 4:
Embed privacy compliance in organizational culture As with any compliance program, privacy must be deeply woven into the culture of the organization. This includes identifying corporate-wide compliance gaps, creating a plan to close those gaps, and implementing policies and procedures to do so. Persistence will be key. As one security manager told us, “You have to keep your eyes out and remain persistent in your conversations with people until you understand what’s happening and communicate to them what they need to do.”
Step 5:
Continuously monitor requirements It may seem that once you’ve steered through the murky waters of privacy compliance and have finally found some clarity in determining a framework, you run into sudden or unexpected changes in laws and regulations. But don’t allow this to slow your momentum. Remember that compliance with privacy and data protection laws are continuously evolving, and that security is just one piece of the privacy puzzle.
Information source: Data Privacy and Protection 101: A CIO’s Guide
Editorial From the team at EEKC Dell and CAI are pleased to present the third edition of the EEKC. This newsletter addresses the challenges and presents the advancements made in the field of data storage with a special focus on various data storage solutions available.
We look forward to your views, reviews and opinions. Keep writing in!
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Tapan Garg Founder and CEO World CIO Council and CIO Association of India E: tapan@cioindia.org W: www.cioindia.org