How Western Digital Created A Proactive Storage Backbone For Matrimony.com

The Indian culture has always looked at marriage as a sacred ceremony, performed in complete gusto with a week-long celebration on both the bride and the groom’s side. As technology disrupts almost every aspect of our lives, marriages weren’t left untouched. In 2001, a signature internet conglomerate Matrimony.com was launched that managed multiple brands in online marriage and matchmaking services. Today, it is one of the fastest growing organization both online and offline and they continue to be known as pioneers in innovation, technical excellence and entrepreneurship.

This Chennai based firm is the largest matchmaking website in the country with over 3.2 million users across its network of over 300 websites. Recently their business expanded and Matrimony.com ventured into the sector of wedding services, one of the key vertical under which is Matrimony Photography which makes use of legacy storage systems spread across 4 states in the country for managing their client data and videos. However, this business along with the various services that they now offer generate a huge amount of data, that was affecting the performance and availability of these systems as well. As a solution to this, they implemented Western Digital’s archival storage platforms for improved performance.

Challenges Faced by Bharatmatrimony.com

Matrimony.com over the years have managed to expand their offerings across India and worldwide, with services including EliteMatrimony, Matrimony Photography, CommunityMatrimony, Matrimony Directory, Matrimony Bazaar, Matrimony Mandap etc.  

With business expansion, comes the need for the organization’s IT infrastructure to evolve in the same pace and scale. MatrimonyPhotography, one of our key business verticals and through this unit we offer photography services across South India.  The company provides a range of specialized photography and videography services for weddings covering everything from on-location shooting to taking aerial shots with a remote-controlled Helicam. Close to 1000 events are hosted every month in every location and more than 10TB of data is generated. As their services became more popular the storage needs also grew.

"The first challenge we faced was that the legacy storage systems did not have sufficient capacity to scale as per our increasing business needs. Although we explored many storage options, deployments were slow, and scalability was limited by space, power and cooling constraints in their data centers. In short, performance and availability started to take a hit and that affected the customer experience," said Mugunthan Soundararajan, Vice President - Technology - Matrimony.com.

Solutions and Offerings Cater To The Requirements of Matrimony.com:

Matrimony Photography is one among its customized solutions, and as the business grew across cities, the need for a high-performance data storage solution became critical to securely store the immense footage accumulated from each wedding.

Initially, the company deployed several NAS boxes which came with different operating systems (OS) and architectures. Data availability and throughput became a significant challenge. As the number of NAS boxes grew, managing, storing and retrieving data became difficult, time-consuming and its internal team had to be experts in working on multiple OSs.

“We came across Western Digital’s portfolio and evaluated their solutions for improving the performance and availability of our rich and unstructured data such as photographs, videos (footage) in their storage systems. We discovered the HGST 4U60G2 Storage Platform, a high-capacity, enterprise-class solution, which was apt to solve issues of scalability, speed, power consumption all at reasonable costs. This device’s SAS port for server connections helped eliminate the network bottleneck and allowed for a much smaller footprint in the data center. With Western Digital’s storage platform to help reduce the number OSs and systems we need to use, we upload significantly more videos everyday than we were capable of before deployment," says Mugunthan.

Vivek Tyagi, Director of Business Development, Embedded & Enterprise, Western Digital said "We learnt about the challenges Matrimony.com was facing with the growing number of NAS boxes. Manageability and complexity had become a serious issue for them. The NAS boxes in use were being outpaced by their data and system requirements, resulting in data storing and retrieving becoming tedious and a time-consuming task. We suggested the HGST 4U60G2 Storage Platform, a high-capacity, enterprise-class solution to address the problem. On deployment, we saw the platform help resolve their issues of scalability, speed, power consumption and cost. The 12Gb/s SAS port feature for server connections helped eliminate the network bottleneck. The density of the solution allowed for a smaller footprint in the data center and the solution was deployed in all 4 locations: Chennai, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala. Matrimony.com is now exploring the use of SSDs in the Storage Platform for even greater performance."

Archival storage platforms

We now live in a world where terabytes and petabytes of data need to be stored and retained for a long period of time. This data needs to be preserved and accessible at any point. Data is very critical to enterprises and they are constantly looking at competent solutions to store their data.

"We at Western Digital understand the growing needs of our consumers and offer them a large archival storage solution called ActiveScale. This archival solution is primarily utilized in the media and entertainment industry, where we see the need among large production houses. They need to store petabytes of video footage that needs to be preserved over a long period of time. Another sector that necessitates this solution is the Life Science industry. Tons of data is created in this segment and it needs to be preserved to be able to be retrieved later, for analysis and studies. Apart from these two segments, BFSI (Banking, Financial services and Insurance) also generates large volumes of critical data that needs to be preserved due to regulatory requirements. Our ActiveScale solution provides the capability to deploy and scale easily, with extreme durability, easy management procedure and excellent Total cost of ownership (TCO)," Vivek added.