NetApp has announced that HT Media has greatly enhanced its storage infrastructure and IT environment with its recent implementation of a NetApp FAS6030 unified storage and data management solution. 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).

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," says Mohit Agarwal, chief information officer, HT Media. "We looked at all of the leading storage vendors, and finally chose NetApp to streamline our storage infrastructure."

NetApp provided HT Media with a unified storage platform that enhanced efficiency, improved management, and reduced IT costs through consolidation. HT Media also experienced additional flexibility due to NetApp's approach to virtualisation, which enabled the organisation 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.

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 on-time production of publications every day and to keep the Website updated by the minute.

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