TexTech Manages Data Growth With HP AiO Storage

Chennai-based TexTech International is an e-publishing company that provides solutions to enable publishers to create, manage, re-purpose and distribute content. The spectrum of services provided by TexTech include project management, copy editing, page composition, proof reading, art creation, keyboarding and data conversion.

By 2010, TexTech envisions to be a frontrunner in the Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) industry by growing its revenue by three folds. The planned growth has presented some challenges, primary among which, is the way to tackle the growing data. This prompted the company to deploy HP All-in-One Storage, AiO 600 with AutoLoader (Ultrium 448), to counter the mounting challenge of saving and managing the excessive data growth.

Data availability – A serious issue

For an e-publishing company such as TexTech, data is received in the form of large files - on occasions, a complete book with over 500 scanned pages. This data has to be stored, received, sent and processed on a rapid and regular basis. Hence, data availability was becoming a serious bottleneck.

As A B Rathinavel, manager-IT, TexTech International, points out, “Server disk space was running short. The data had to be migrated onto an external hard disk and tape to free up much-needed disk space. We had deployed single server from HP earlier. Since the same server was working overtime performing tasks such as file serving, mailing, supporting in-house applications, while also stretching to store data, performance levels had started to come down.”

To compound the problems, 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 had become a tricky issue.

Also, there was no robust data protection plan, which was a potential risk for a company whose business was highly data dependent. The system admin resources that 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.

Deploying HP AiO 600

To surmount the growing data availability challenge, TexTech decided to opt for a networked storage. Informs Rathinavel, “A storage system which will provide a sound combination of availability, scalability, performance and ease of deployment was the key requirement. It was also essential that the solution should be affordable and cost effective. After evaluating other vendor’s solution like EMC and considering all factors, we decided that the HP Storage Works All-in-One Storage system is the ideal choice. 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. Instead, the HP All-in-One Storage solution took care of all these requirements in one simple solution.”

The solution integrated seamlessly with all existing application like MS Exchange and MS SQL, and there was no downtime during migration. The AiO was deployed at a cost of around Rs 9 lakh, and currently 50 remote locations are connected to the server.

Productivity levels augment

The AiO 600 storage solution has greatly improved the turnaround time for data retrieval. Since all key team members now have direct access to the system, they can locate and retrieve files themselves, thereby enabling the system administrator to indulge in more productive work.

Consequently, productivity levels have also improved. Backup is now automated and TexTech has an effective data protection plan in place, to guard and protect their most valuable data. TexTech also envisaged an aggressive technology roadmap in terms of server deployment in the future. The company is planning to deploy Lotus Notes in the coming days.

Informs Rathinavel, “From day one, we have received ROI and the cost of maintaining hardware has also reduced to very minimum. The down time migration is zero. As we are in the process of expanding IT infrastructure of our remote offices, we want to centralise the administration work, for which we are planning to deploy Lotus Notes. The turnaround time for data retrieval has improved by almost 100%. Our anticipated cost savings over a five year time frame from the AiO would be between 30-35%.”