The Creative Cloud

Industry after industry is dipping its toes in this new cloud ocean. The digital entertainment industry is not far behind. Reliance Entertainment Digital (the digital arm of Reliance Entertainment) is a good example of how cloud provides the right infrastructure for delivering quality content and user experience. Being in entertainment business, the requirements of compute resources for this business are different from others. Reliance Entertainment Digital is into 360 degree digital business that comprises gaming portals, online video streaming, e-business, and high-end mobile game development and publishing business amongst others, which require very high-end compute resources to deliver good user experience to consumers. With a global audience, both scalability and availability of infrastructure is a prime construct for the business.

The pre-existing IT set up at Reliance Entertainment Digital was a mixed bag and they had tried different tech solutions for each digital business separately. It became essential for them to look at a common platform for traditional setup. Against this backdrop, the company's leadership thought of partnering with a cloud vendor who could take complete ownership of IT.

Key Considerations

The Reliance team first laid down some parameters aimed at zeroing on the right and best solutions available in the market. It also created a roadmap and listed its expectations from the cloud rollout. The key things it considered were:

• Integrated solution-DC, Cloud Infrastructure, Communications: Single service SLA.
• Operational Knowledge, exposure to successful management of wide range of incidents, across communications, data center, and IT infrastructure
• Skillset: across IT & non-IT aspects of datacenter.
• Live Migration of 450 workloads & 30TB data from traditional to virtual environment with very less impact and disturbance to business uptime.
• Higher RoI and lower TCO.

Choosing the hybrid cloud model

The management identified various options that were available considering the volume and requirements of infrastructure technology. From an economic point of view, the options were one time capex to build private cloud or go for entirely public cloud. But the idea was that one-time capex would lead to more capex eventually. Pure play public cloud also did not quite fit the bill. The choice fell on hybrid cloud that gave the flexibility and continued ROI and a host of other benefits in economics and performance.

After screening various providers, the company chose NxtGen as the infrastructure service provider. "We had evaluated ample amount of service providers before closing on with NxtGen. However, we closed on with NxtGen based on the proposal they brought to us, which seemed to take care of end to end solution we were looking at as well as the service support they were offering. The configuration of infra such as server configuration on new Intel platform proposed by them also attracted us as it was fitting the exact need for our service offering to our consumers" says Sayed Peerzade, Vice President, Technology at Reliance Entertainment Digital.

With this, Reliance Entertainment Digital built a private cloud with a virtualized environment at their DC for critical and predictable apps and moved dynamic contents and apps to a public cloud. The management makes sure to have a tight connectivity mechanism for both the clouds which makes it one hybrid cloud. This step brought a lot of flexibility by reducing physical server footprint to 80%, thereby contributed to environment by reducing power/cooling/space requirements.

The benefits of NxtGen cloud solution include:

• Flexibility of adding or removing services at their will.
• Time to market has been improved.
• Users are getting better user experience.
• Biggest benefit is cost, they are able to reduce operational costs to 60% comparing to traditional setup.

With the infrastructure in place, Reliance Entertainment Digital is now seeking value through technologies like big data and analytics.

"We have taken a big step towards big data, where we want to collect the events from all serving devices from the globe (our services) and do the analytics to strategize our business further. The events we want to capture are in 100's of millions a day and it requires huge infra capabilities and technologies like HADOOP/MapReduce to mine such data. NxtGen again is helping us to build an extended DC to achieve our big data requirements," says Sayed.