NDTV manages data growth with Dell solution

Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN solution has helped NDTV India handle data growth with minimal IT staff and without unexpected technical difficulties. By Manjari Juneja

With 23 offices and studios New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV) is India’s largest private producer of news, current affairs, and entertainment television with modern news and production operation. With an ever increasing IT infrastructure, NDTV needed a solution to consolidate the storage for all the servers, to be backed up and managed by a single IT staffer. The company also realized that a central storage area network (SAN) would also dramatically decrease the complexity and cost of maintaining adequate storage capacity and data protection for over a dozen servers.

K. Y. Iyer, IT Head, NDTV said, “IT has contributed very substantially to NDTV’s explosive growth in the last 3-4 years. We have two types of data; we have the traditional IT data which is made up of our databases, email or user files and so on so forth. Additional data is of video which is more than traditional data. Our challenge was from a long-term legal compliance perspective with the traditional IT data which every organization faces—how to procure databases, finance, etc.”

NDTV’s previous configuration used servers on Direct Attached Storage (DAS) that were not expandable. NDTV was at a disadvantage because it could not scale or easily back up and protect the data on the decentralized arrays. The company evaluated different storage systems, and finally chose Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN solution. After a successful trial, it quickly implemented Dell EqualLogic SAN for storage and as a basis for future disaster recovery plans.

Key issue

With a one-person IT staff and massive data growth, it was difficult to consolidate, store, and protect the data without disrupting broadcasts to millions of customers.

Added Iyer, “We grew to a point where we had to think of consolidating and protecting our services. IT was becoming a critical service, which was important for the functioning of core business of the organization. We needed the solution which could scale easily, give us the same and higher performance as the previous DAS storage, one that would detach the data from the application and to be able to protect the data in multiple ways. We wanted real-time protection.”

The solution

NDTV deployed a Dell EqualLogic PS Series 5000E on a Microsoft Windows Server platform with 3.5 terabytes of storage, providing a cost-effective, flexible alternative to the previous DAS environment. The Dell EqualLogic SAN consolidates storage for most of NDTV’s servers onto a centralized, highly redundant platform— and its increased performance and reliability enables NDTV’s IT department to run the whole environment without a lot of complexity.

“Dell claimed the more trace you add the more performance you will get, which was difficult for us to digest in the beginning. We started evaluating their software features and saw almost a 20% performance increase on the same hardware and this was with no optimization done on the network,” stated Iyer.

The Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage area network (SAN) deployment offered adequate storage capacity as well as ease of manageability, decreased complexity, and disaster recovery protection.

Many advantages

Since NDTV deployed the Dell EqualLogic storage solution, the company has seen more consistent, reliable performance. The sophistication of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage management feature provides capabilities for future implementations.

Iyer said, “We are able to protect our data with lesser user intervention than was required earlier and it is easier to scale the amount of storage we need for the data. SAN was the critical building block for us in our virtualization efforts. We have consolidated all our data from 35 servers to one main island, which is easily manageable and scalable. We have not seen any performance degradation in the last 2-3 years and our data is now much safer then it was 2-3 years ago.”

As NDTV’s IT infrastructure continues to develop, the company plans to expand its storage capacity and backup all IT data to the primary data center. The PS Series includes a snapshot manager and an auto-replication feature to help ensure that NDTV’s data on the SAN and at the backup site is always current. Because of scalability, ease of management, the accommodation of ever-increasing data storage needs, and business continuity support, the Dell storage solution is getting a great reception from NDTV.

manjari.juneja@expressindia.com