HT Media in India Implements NetApp FAS6030

NetApp announced that HT Media, one of India’s largest media companies, has greatly enhanced its storage infrastructure and IT environment with its recent implementation of a NetApp FAS6030 unified storage and data management solution. Thanks to NetApp, HT Media can now more easily scale its IT infrastructure as needed to meet both performance and capacity demands. In addition, NetApp helped HT Media simultaneously upgrade its SAP enterprise applications without losing valuable time to extensive system shutdowns, all while meeting stringent service-level agreements (SLAs).

HT Media, publisher of one of India’s most well-read newspapers, the Hindustan Times, with a daily circulation of 2.5 million, also has businesses involved with the Internet, radio, TV and entertainment. Prior to implementing NetApp, HT Media invested significantly in building its IT infrastructure, specifically to support enterprise applications such as SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) and more. HT Media’s previous storage setup consisted essentially of different server vendors’ storage systems and distributed DAS islands that were not scalable. As a result, production processes were impacted, backup and recovery processes were painful, and disaster recovery (DR) was practically nonexistent.

"HT Media was at a critical juncture in our business evolution and needed a storage solution that could scale with us and help us deliver on our business needs," said Mohit Agarwal, chief information officer, HT Media. "We looked at all of the leading storage vendors, and NetApp clearly stood out as the best solution to streamline our storage infrastructure and support the demands of our dynamic and growing business."

NetApp provided HT Media with a unified storage platform that enhanced efficiency, improved management, and reduced IT costs through consolidation. HT Media experienced additional flexibility thanks to NetApp’s approach to virtualization, which enabled the organization to allocate storage resources on demand. NetApp FlexClone technology provided HT Media with the powerful test and development capability needed to support continuous upgrades and new rollouts of enterprise applications such as solutions from SAP AG. Moreover, during the upgrade of SAP solutions, there was no need for an extensive system shutdown as NetApp FlexClone technology allowed both the implementation vendor and HT Media to meet the stringent SLAs that were previously set.

NetApp also strengthened HT Media’s backup and recovery capacity. NetApp’s unique RAID-DP functionality coupled with disk-based backup/restore and disaster recovery capabilities helped to enhance HT Media’s business continuity. In addition, NetApp’s Snapshot technology addressed the recovery needs of the busy media house to support the on-time production of publications every day and to keep the Web site updated by the minute.

"We undertook a major IT overhaul project and failure was not an option," said Agarwal. "NetApp truly helped to make our transition a success as its best-practice documentation, along with its sizing tool for SAP solutions, allowed us make the right technical decisions and then execute them quickly. The benefits are there for all of us to see."

"Organizations today are constantly looking for ways to improve their business processes and SAP solutions play a large role in that," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions marketing for NetApp. "With NetApp’s strong testing and development capabilities, along with several industry leading storage and data management solutions, we are able to help foster a more efficient and streamlined IT infrastructure for those organizations that are deploying SAP applications."