Storage is considered the lifeline for enterprises as all mission-critical applications reside in it. Apart from that, the need to enable access to applications on a 24x7 basis calls for proactive management of the storage architecture. We have been discussing cases from various large enterprises and how they are managing the various IT solutions that they're using. Storage is not the prerogative of large enterprises alone, but can play a crucial role even for firms such as AC Nielsen, the world's largest market research firm that provides information on various segments. According to company sources, AC Nielsen has more than 9,000 clients in over 100 countries that rely on its services to measure competitive marketplace dynamics, to understand consumer attitudes and behavior, and to develop advanced analytical insights aimed at bringing increased sales and profits.

The world's largest market research firm operates in India under dual brands: AC Nielsen (for retail measurement services) and AC Nielsen ORG-MARG (for customized research services). The company's service portfolio includes retail measurement, consumer panel research, and customized research. AC Nielsen employs more than 800 market research professionals in India. These professionals are based in six full-fledged branch offices at Baroda, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Bangalore. In addition, the company has over 100 field offices across the country, and over 850 research investigators operating from these field offices. 

The IT Pain Areas
The company was using Direct Attached Storage (DAS), mainly connected to individual servers, on a Windows platform. All applications were running on these individual servers with separate storage. But due to the magnanimity  of its operations, the key challenges the company faced were in terms of data accessibility, storage, and retrieval. The company's range of services across multiple industry verticals results in a high and continuous data churn. Exposure to business risks because of the inherent data and information shortcomings are unacceptable. AC Nielsen's data is indeed its product; thus maintaining high levels of data integrity and performance, along with continuous availability of information, were critical.

AC Nielsen has a vast market presence across locations and high growth rate; the existing DAS configurations were non-scalable. Moreover, it became unreliable and costly to operate. The volume of work was increasing and a lot more data had to be stored and retrieved. Under-utilization of storage resources and the need to implement Disaster Recovery to efficiently manage the IT infrastructure were some of the major pain areas that AC Nielsen was faced with.

The Solution: Unified Storage
Once the IT pain areas have been mapped, the selection of the right fit solution is indeed a daunting task. The company went through that phase and carried out due diligence on various storage solutions from vendors such as EMC, Intransa, and HP (who were  invited to bid for the requirement). EMC proposed its Netwin/NS series solutions with Legato Replistor as the solution. HP had MSA series with a third party replication software solution to address the requirement. According to Bhushan Akerkar, executive director-IST, South Asia, AC Nielsen ORG-MARG, “We went through a very detailed evaluation process, where vendors were asked to give references for successfully deployed DR solutions. Moreover, the evaluation parameters hinged on scalability and resource characteristics of the solution.”

Since the company's expectations were high, it went through a six-month evaluation phase. The conceptual framework of the solution revolved around creating a centralized database, which could be replicated and accessed all across India. The company zeroed in on NetApp, because the solution supported a wide range of applications via different protocols. Further, the solution was easy to upgrade and disaster recovery systems could be implemented at a fast pace.

Says Chetan Shah, associate director-IST, AC Nielsen ORG-MARG,  “The solution we zeroed in had the edge because of its capability in providing a combined storage and disaster recovery and flawless interoperability with various protocols. Moreover NetApp also had their own OS for applications and other tasks as compared to the competitive solutions, which were running on Windows storage servers.”

"Since our requirements were unique, we had a rigorous six-month evaluation phase. The conceptual framework of the solution revolved around creating a centralized database, which could be replicated and accessed all across India"           -Bhushan Akerkar, executive director- IST, South Asia, AC Nielsen ORG-MARG

The Implementation
The unified storage solution went live in April 2005. Of the six key locations, FAS 270 with three TB each was deployed in Mumbai and Baroda. FAS 250 with one TB each was deployed in Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and two in Bangalore. The solution also included NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI protocols. NetApp's SnapMirror software enabled mirroring of mission-critical application data across sites. Other third-party hardware and software products used in conjunction with NetApp solution include Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Oracle 8i for Windows, Microsoft Exchange, and RMS Factory.

Baroda is the central data processing hub for the RMS division. The data processing application-Retail Factory-runs on an Oracle platform. The total volume of data stored on the system is approx 300 GB with monthly updates. Before the new system was made live, all users were first asked to transfer their data (on local PCs/servers) to the NetApp filers via NAS protocols. Mirroring was implemented once all the user data was transferred to the filers.

The Busines Benefits
With all IT implementations aimed at well defined benefits, lets look at the post implementation scenario. The benefits AC Nielsen derived out of its unified storage rollout relates to the overall improvement of its operational efficiencies. File sharing, database, and messaging applications that are critical to enterprise operations, are supported by reliability, performance, and scalability.

Back up processes are now simpler and reliable. Quips Akerkar, “Prior to the unified storage implementation, we struggled with back ups and data recovery. Now, thanks to the advanced applications such as NetApp SnapMirror, data availability and data recovery of mission critical applications are expedited efficiently. Clearly, we have saved enormous amount on administrative costs.”  Meanwhile, the unified storage solution has enabled hierarchical data access; with access rights as per the user's authorization level. Centralized storage of data has ensured tremendous time saving for users.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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