Case Study : Store Some More

Located in the heart of Chennai, TexTech International is a well known
e-publishing company with a global presence. Promoted by Multivista Global Ltd,
TexTech provides solutions that enable publishers to create, manage, re-purpose
and distribute content.

With a customer base that spans the United States, Europe, Australia and
India-and a clientele that includes leading names in the publishing business
such as Oxford, Harcourt, John Wiley and Pearson-TexTech caters to the diverse
publishing and rich media requirements of the world's largest publishers of
higher education, scientific and technical literature. The spectrum of services
provided by the company includes project management, copyediting, page
composition, proof reading, art creation, keyboarding and data conversion.

With the global opportunity for publishing outsourcing being estimated at
$8.2 billion, the business for global providers of e-publishing services is
quite simply, booming. The Indian market for publishing outsour­cing is expected
to grow at a CAGR of 38 percent from $200 million in 2005 to $1.1 billion by
2010.

TexTech's plans for growth were equally aggressive. The company aimed to be
at the forefront of this huge global opportunity by growing revenue three folds
by the year 2010.

In its efforts to meet its business goals TexTech took assistance of
Chennai-based solution provider Softbank Micro­systems. The SP who offers
solu­tions in the networking, server and storage space among others welcomed
Tex­Tech's decision and delivered a storage project that was valued at roughly
Rs 4 lakh within the stipulated time period itself.

Challenges galore

Data availability had thus become a huge problem for the company. For an
e-Publishing company such as TexTech, data was received in the form of large
files-on occasion, a complete book with over 500 scanned pages. This data has to
be stored, received, sent and processed, on a rapid and regular basis. Server
disk space was running short and the data had to be migrated onto an external
hard disk and tape to free up much-needed disk space.

Since the same server was working overtime and perfor­ming tasks such as file
serving, mailing, supporting in-house applications-all simultane­ously-while
also stretching to store data, performance levels had started to come down.

“Implementing this new solution became a challenge for us as we had to deal
with a number of issues right from multiple platforms to scheduling and matching
the customer's requirements,” stated P Kishore, Director, Softbank Micro
Systems.

To sum up, there was no common storage available for the users of Apple Mac
systems. The existing server could support Windows PCs only and storing Apple
Mac files containing graphics and illustrations was becoming problematic.

Added to this was the fact that a robust data protection plan was not in
place. Manual data backups were run, but not in a scheduled fashion. Thus for a
company whose business was highly data dependant, this posed a potential risk.

The other challenge for TexTech was that with the volume of business growing
in geometric proportions, the system administration resour­ces-who were also
responsible for data retrieval-were getting increa­singly stretched. Since human
intervention was required constantly to retrieve files from tape, the process
was cumbersome, slow and very often, error prone.

“We took note of all of the above and since the time given to us was one week
we geared to meet the client's demand under all circumstances. During the
deployment of the project we made assessment of the flow of data and we did live
data tests as well. All this was not an easy task and we had to a lot of
research for the same,” mentioned Kishore.

Networked storage

To overcome the growing data avai­lability challenge, TexTech decided to opt
for a networked storage. TexTech had clarified to the team at Softbank Micro
Systems that they were looking for a storage system that provided a sound
combination of availa­bility, scalability, perfor­mance and ease of deployment.
It was also essential that the solution be affordable and cost effective.

After evaluating and considering all factors Softbank Micro Systems deployed
HP All-in-One Storage - AIO 600 with AutoLoader (Ultrium 448). A team of three
engineers was given the task to deploy the product. Softbank saw to it that
there was no downtime during migration and the solution integrated seamlessly
with all existing applications, MS Exchange and MS SQL.

On the fast track

With the solution deployed successfully, the turnaround time for data
retrieval has improved by leaps and bounds for TexTech. “Since all key team
members now have direct access to the system, they can locate and retrieve files
themselves, thus freeing up the system administrator for more produc­tive work.
The produc­tivity level has improved tremendously. In terms of backup it is
automated and we have an effective data protection plan in place, to guard and
protect our most valuable asset — data,” opined AVR Venkatesa, CEO, TexTech
International. Besides the system also gives the company a beforehand
information when 85 percent of the space on the server has been used so that it
can take note of the same immediately.

The alternative to deploying AiO would have been to add two servers (an
Exchange server and an application server), purcha­sing additional hard disks
and managing different infrastruc­ture-all of which would have meant additional
costs.

“It was a huge learning experience for us. This was a new technology and
there were multiple platforms involved in the same. Besides we has limited time
in our hands and had to deliver under all circumstances. We will refer to this
project in the years to come,” added Kishore.

POOJA SHARMA

poojas@cybermedia.co.in