On A Song

Saregama India Ltd, formerly known as The Gramophone Company of India Ltd,
started operations in India in 1901 as the first overseas branch of Electrical
and Musical Industries Ltd, London. As one of India's largest and best-known
music recording company, it owns the largest music archives in India and one of
the biggest in the world. The company has regional offices in 4 metros and total
staff strength of 750 people. Saregama's music is marketed in the overseas
markets through its two subsidiaries, namely RPG Global Music and Saregama Plc.
The company produces every kind of record formats: Music Cassettes, Compact
Discs, VCDs, DVDs.

Being the largest music recording company has not come easy for Saregama.
With a huge repository of songs since 100 years meant the company faced a
challenge in terms of storing and managing around two lakh digitized audio songs
and were looking at a storage solution which would help them consolidate the
data (digitized songs) and was scalable. “Since we had a lot of intellectual
property assets in terms of the songs we required a lot of storage space and
this posed a big problem for us since getting adequate storage space was
cumbersome,” Saregama's IT manager Arnab Bhattacharya said.

As the stockpile of songs increased, the worries for the company increased
manifold and the company started looking at various options for digitizing
format. “We did some benchmarking and decided to consult the experts for
solutions,” he said. The company was looking at three vendors primarily and
EMC India was one of the vendors.

But the management was also equally concerned about handling the issue of
financial constraints.

Like most other enterprises, Saregama was plagued with the problem of
obsolescence of technology as up gradation to a new technology from an old one
meant additional expenditure which meant burden on its budget. “One would also
need a proper data center which again meant investing money in setting it up,”
Bhattacharya added. Fortunately for Saregama, the company's top management was
extremely IT savvy “and was equally convinced that the IT assets needed proper
protection so there was no problem in getting an approval from them.”

The management then zeroed in on EMC India for solving its data storage
problem. Bhattacharya attributes the choice to several factors, comfort and
support being the primary ones. “We chose EMC because of the comfort factor as
well as the commercial side. For us support was a major concern and the feedback
we received from various companies did the trick and given the configuration and
rates we finalized on EMC,” he said.

The company opted for EMC CLARiiON CX300 (mid-tier networked storage system)
with EMC NS 502G (EMC NS Series/Gateway NAS solution). “They went for 16 TB
capacity in Sep 2005 and  initially stored 1,60,000 digitized songs on
this. Later, in May 2006 they went for additional 8TB to store additional 40,000
songs,” said vice president, EMC North and East India, Rajesh Janey.

Studi Das