Delivering 24/7 Availability for 24-Hour News

Overview

Challenge

• Enable one of India’s largest media houses to keep its print and broadcast operations running 24/7 with highly reliable and available IT infrastructure.

Solution

• Ensure 100% data availability with a resilient three-data center architecture built on Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Hitachi Advanced Server.   

Outcome

• Achieve near-zero downtime, reduce storage management workload and boost performance, while reducing energy costs 70%.

Challenge

Founded in Kerala more than 135 years ago, the Malayala Manorama Company Limited publishes Malayala Manorama, the second-largest newspaper in India by circulation and 14th largest in the world. In recent years, the company has evolved into a modern media house, with a diverse portfolio of print, broadcast and online media brands.

In an era of 24-hour news and streaming media, Malayala Manorama has one major requirement for its IT infrastructure: complete availability. If journalists can’t access the systems they need, if broadcast systems go offline or if movie streams are constantly buffering, there’s a risk that audiences will turn to other providers. That’s why the company has established a highly robust IT architecture, with four major data centers and 11 local sites all linked by a resilient network.

The company’s media archive is growing all the time, and its business-critical systems – mainly SAP and applications running on VMware – are hungry for storage too. As a result, Malayala Manorama constantly invests in new IT infrastructure.

“We took the position several years ago that we will only use the cloud for our online properties,” explains V V Jacob, Senior General Manager IT at Malayala Manorama. “For our print and broadcast business, all the infrastructure is in-house, which gives us more control and cost advantages. For example, we recycle older servers and storage from our main data centers to run less-critical services at our remote locations, which cuts our total operating costs.”

So, when the time came to refresh its core infrastructure once again, the company’s strategy was clear. The only question was, which vendor should it choose to supply its new servers and storage? “If you want excellent availability and performance, you need high-quality hardware,” says V V Jacobs. “That’s why we selected Hitachi Vantara.”.

Solution

Malayala Manorama’s key requirements were for a solution that would maximize availability, support growth and increase data center efficiency. Based on these factors, the company’s trusted IT partner Vertex recommended a solution based on Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E-Series technology and Hitachi Advanced Servers.

“Hitachi Vantara was not an unknown quantity for us. We had been using their arrays for several years and we were happy with the performance,” says V V Jacob. “We were also impressed with Hitachi’s commitment. Their senior leadership team have visited us, and those personal relationships are just as important as the quality of the technology. And above all, Hitachi Vantara is the only vendor that offers a 100% data availability guarantee. It shows that they have confidence in their products. And  in our experience, that confidence is fully justified.”

From a technical perspective, Malayala Manorama appreciated the performance of the Hitachi VSP storage, with its low latency 64Gbps fabric, NVMe drives for rapid application response times and NLSAS high-density media for superior cost-effectiveness. Hitachi Ops Center Administrator also simplifies storage management tasks for the IT team. And the company plans to introduce Ops Center Analyzer too, to gain new insight into storage performance and capacity.

V V Jacob comments, “Both from a commercial and a technical perspective, we’ve been happy with the transparent and straightforward approach of the Vertex and Hitachi teams. We got the right solution at the right price, and it has been a successful engagement for all three companies.”

Outcome

With the new storage in place, the Malayala Manorama team was able to seamlessly migrate data from its old arrays, and the whole project was completed on schedule and within budget. Today, the organization benefits from significantly faster performance, with users commenting that applications that used to take several seconds to process tasks now respond almost instantly.

“Total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the arrays has also improved significantly,” adds V V Jacob. “Storage density has increased dramatically, which means we need 66% less rack space to house the same capacity, and we are saving 70% on our power and cooling costs.”

Availability is extremely high, thanks to the quality of the hardware and its ability to recover automatically from disk failures. And thanks to the three-way replication between data centers, the IT team will be able to fail over to a backup system almost instantly, even if a serious failure occurs.

V V Jacob concludes,: “Hitachi helps us stay at the forefront of storage technology, and their proactive support is second to none. The open and honest relationships we’ve built with Hitachi and Vertex mean we have partners we can trust as we continue to grow and scale our business in the future.”