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“Unlike other SMB units which face resistance from their senior management on IT implementation issues, luckily we never had that problem as the senior management is fully aware of what IT can do to business. As a result we have proactively invested heavily on IT right from the early days,” says Ramkrishna P Kodali, director of IT and pre-press, Pragati Offsets.

Established in 1962 in Hyderabad, as a commercial offset printing solutions Provider, Pragati Offsets has evolved into serving large corporate customers across India, US, Europe and Japan. The company prints materials ranging from annual reports and marketing collateral to packaging and presentation folders. The company's operations are backed by an extensive management information system and a network of computers spread across pre-press, press and post-press equipment and connected to a central database.

The team's work begins with retouching high-resolution image scans and arranging them with text and other graphics using a desktop publishing application and translating this document into PDF format.

Pragati generates large volumes of three primary types of data-desktop application data; rasterized data sent to different devices like proofers, image setters and computer to plate printing system; and screened digital films used to generate images on computer-to-plate imaging systems.

To meet the company's growing storage needs at a reasonable cost per terabyte, Kodali began looking for vendors that would help streamline the data storage and retrieval processes while at the same time provide value-added services to boost the performance of printing applications.

And Kodali found the ideal solution from Sun Microsystems. “Sun's storage was a natural choice as we run 3 Sun Solaris Servers. The StorEdge was a right choice, both in terms of technology and price-performance,” he said.  “The combined Sun-StorageTek solution delivers the reliability and performance we need to give our printing company a competitive edge. The hardware/software combination helped us reduce our total cost of ownership while implementing an ILM strategy,” he said.

At their Hyderabad facility, Pragati has a Sun Enterprise 250 server which runs its high-end pre-press application. To support its production environment, the company uses a Sun StorEdge array. For simplifying administration and automating information lifecycle management processes, the company installed StorageTek's Application Storage Manager (ASM) software.

The company soon benefited from its storage deployment solutions from Sun-StorageTek. The robotic library and ASM automation helped them manage its storage in a more cost-effective manner. The 8-terabyte capacity of the L40 tape library helped them make better use of valuable floor space in its data center.

The high reliability of Sun servers ensured business and protecting production revenues. Perhaps the greatest financial benefits stems from Pragati's ability to be able to meet the needs of its corporate customers. “With the access to our data center and repository services, our customers are happy and keep coming back to us. They can count on Pragati to adequately manage their brand and information assets like images, logos, text, etc.,” Kodali signs off.

Stuti Das

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