AC Neilson ORG-MARG, a known name in the field of marketing research offers information on various fields ranging from retail to consumer electronics by using various analytical tools. The company has presence in major cities across India and engages more than 1000 professional including market research executives and field workers.

To handle the explosive data growth and to insure its data centre against various disasters, AC Neilson recently implemented Unified Storage Solutions from NetApp.

Handling data growth

With the company’s business growth across India, handling the escalating data growth was a major issue. As the entire business is primarily dependent on data, archiving reports for future reference was also imperative for the researchers. Insuring the data centre against disasters was also vital to continue on the growth path. The use of DAS and other traditional methods of storing and retrieving data were not yielding the desired results, resulting in increased costs.

According to Bhusan Akerkar, executive director, IT, AC Neilson ORG-MARG, “As we are into forecasting about market and satisfying our customer requirements, we deal with data on a daily basis. We are into the core business which only deals with data and in order to protect data from various disasters we felt the need for a better disaster recovery and business continuity planning strategy.”

NetApp emerges winner

AC Neilson evaluated disaster recovery solutions from HP, EMC and NetApp, before zeroing down on NetApp. Wipro was also roped in to help them select the right vendor.

“EMC solutions are typical for large data centres and not suitable for us. We also evaluated storage solutions from HP, but decided to go with NetApp as the transitioning process is smooth.,” states Akerkar

The company deployed the whole NetApp disaster recovery architecture, which includes two NetApp FAS270 systems configured with 3Tb each and five NetApp250 systems with 1 TB each and NetApp SnapMirror software. These solutions also incorporate Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft Exchange, RMS Factory and Oracle database for Windows.

The solutions were implemented at six locations including Baroda, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Mumbai. Baroda is the central data processing hub for the RMS division. The execution process took nearly three to four months at a cost of around Rs 2 crore.

Insurance policy for data

The solution has enabled smooth retrieval of data and better data storage management, leading to reduced costs at AC Neilson. “The solution is now acting as an insurance policy. Critical file and database sharing, messaging applications which are essential parts of AC Neilson operation are easily accessed by our executives across locations. The implementation has also been able to save much time of our researchers and IT teams. The data transfer time has reduced drastically,” explains Akerkar.

High scalability and unmatched business continuity with almost zero down time has helped AC Neilson serve its customers in a better way. AC Neilson is now looking for a better SOA application and is currently evaluating the solutions of major vendors in this space.