Putting Its IT 'Together'

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