Success Story Aegis Media Builds IT Infrastructure on FlexPod to Help Double Business Growth in Five Years

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Customer Profile targets. The company’s existing IT KEY HIGHLIGHTS Aegis Media is the world’s leading infrastructure was broad and decentral- Industry media and digital communications group. ized, with architectures that were Media communications Including five main network brands— disjointed and incompatible. It had 60 Carat, iProspect, Isobar, Posterscope, IT departments, a federated IT estate, The Challenge and Vizeum—the company helps its and no standards, making global Create an easy-to-manage global clients build consumer relationships by management a challenging, costly, IT platform and five regional data effectively communicating their products and time-consuming complexity. centers from fractured legacy and brands. Its services include commu- Given the company’s global scale, with IT systems to enable ambitious nications strategy through creative digital approximately 14,000 users across its business growth. media, media planning and buying, territories, and the fact that it had grown mobile applications, search engine opti- The Solution organically through acquisition, it was ® mization (SEO), brand tracking, and Implement a FlexPod Datacenter hardly surprising that its operational market analytics. solution from NetApp and Cisco, model was costly and inefficient. For ® with NetApp backup storage to The organization employs approximately example, in some regions servers were create a flexible, future-proofed 12,000 people, has a presence in 80 located beneath desks and in cupboards. platform. countries across five continents, and Overall, the company had 2,700 chalked up a £197.4 million operating Benefits servers, approximately one for every profit in 2011. Its overarching strategy is • 15% reduction in IT budget five people. It also had over 1,000 to double revenues in the next five years • 30% reduction in power network switches from six different through aggressive acquisition and by consumption vendors and an inefficient application developing its business in line with its • 80% server virtualization portfolio that consisted of 1,300 line- clients’ growth. • 50% reduction in storage of-business applications, of which footprint The Challenge more than 300 were used to monitor • Automated data deduplication Create a globalized infrastructure and manage the IT estate. • Single management pane from fractured legacy systems Colin Towers, global CTO, Aegis Media, • Consolidated from 160 data cen- Several years ago Aegis Media undertook says, “We have 254 offices in 165 loca- ters to 5 regional data centers a comprehensive review of its business tions across the globe. The company’s • Created flexible, future-proofed and concluded that an organizational target is 30% year-on-year growth platform for hybrid cloud and transformation of finance, HR, and IT through acquisition, with the aim of new business services was essential to meet ambitious growth “One of the key factors for us was that we could go from 3.5” drives to 2.5” drives. This reduces our storage footprint by 50% and also brings down power consumption. Given the global scale of our IT infrastructure, these savings are considerable. The reduction in performance when compared to 3.5” drives is offset by NetApp Flash Cache.” James Morris Global Architect, Aegis Media

doubling our size by 2017. Clearly, with quantities are in the region of 2.5PB to scalable solution. This solution supports a fractured IT infrastructure and the 3PB and growing at an exponential rate. all protocols out of the box, so the com- enormous management complexity it Storage was an important issue that pany didn’t need to use different systems brings, these growth plans would be needed to be successfully addressed for different storage needs. Built-in data seriously hindered.” for the present and also looking ahead.” deduplication and thin provisioning, along with space-efficient backup, also The company had 170 data centers, To develop and architect a solution, enhance operational efficiency. though some of these were little more the company partnered with Tata than isolated servers. It aimed to consoli- Consultancy Services. Aegis Media Morris points out, “One of the key fac- date these into five regional data centers had been using EMC storage solutions tors for us was that we could go from located in North America, EMEA, and for approximately 10 years, but this 3.5” drives to 2.5” drives. This reduces Asia Pacific, with server rooms in Latin environment was proving to be com- our storage footprint by 50% and also America, Russia, China, Australia, and plex, with different management brings down power consumption. Given South Africa. The company’s ultimate requirements for different storage levels. the global scale of our IT infrastructure, goal was to create one data center for The company considered storage tech- these savings are considerable. The each region, with 95% of its servers nology from a number of other vendors, reduction in performance when com- and services located in these data including IBM and HP, before deciding pared to 3.5” drives is offset by NetApp centers. Further, it aimed to virtualize on traditional NetApp backup storage Flash Cache™.” approximately 80% of its servers. along with the FlexPod Datacenter platform from NetApp and Cisco. The intelligent caching functionality within The key driver underpinning these Morris adds, “The great thing about FlexPod is also a powerful feature for objectives was the development of a FlexPod Datacenter is that it’s more Aegis Media. Automatically responding global centralized IT infrastructure that straightforward than other technologies. to changing needs, the NetApp storage would enable the company to easily At the storage level, whether it’s an platform promotes hot data to flash with- adopt new services and technologies as entry-level storage box in a branch out moving on-disk data. It is also deeply and when required. Towers says, “We office or high-end enterprise storage efficient and enables SATA to match Fibre wanted to build an IT infrastructure that arrays, the management is the same Channel performance at half the cost, adapts to the business rather than an and can be carried out from a single and works out of the box with default infrastructure that dictated what the pane of glass.” settings. In short, it is optimized for business can do.” cost performance. The FlexPod Datacenter solution is a The Solution combination of NetApp storage; Cisco® “We have relationships with all the stor- A single globalized platform that’s Unified Computing System™ (UCS®) age vendors, but what we took from the flexible and easy to manage B-Series Blade Servers; Cisco Nexus® engagement with NetApp was that we One of the first issues to be considered 7010, 5596UP, and 5548UP switches; could provide a wide range of services was the foundational platform of stor- and other Cisco components, with and gain access to a vast pool of flexible age. James Morris, global architect, VMware® virtualization software layered storage resources with NetApp backup Aegis Media, says, “We were taking on on top. The NetApp storage compo- and the FlexPod platform,” says Morris. a huge consolidation exercise, and we nents reduce cost and complexity for “Our research revealed we could slice wanted a centralized system that would a virtualized infrastructure by meeting be easy to manage. Our current data and dice data in any number of ways, all storage requirements with a single which is important for our future plans,” “NetApp took the legacy equipment and consolidated it into five data centers, enabling us to virtualize 80% of servers, which alone leads to significant cost savings and far greater efficiency.” Colin Towers Global CTO, Aegis Media

he adds. “Management was also hugely use to easily and quickly manage and also been a 25% reduction in required simplified compared to our existing deploy services to the business.” file storage capacity, thanks to auto- systems. We could manage all our stor- mated data deduplication, which frees age from one pane of glass. These were Business Benefits up storage assets as the business compelling points.” A platform for business growth moves forward. The implementation of the FlexPod Data deduplication was another impor- platform has enabled Aegis Media to Zero cost for backups tant feature. As a global organization, begin consolidating its fractured IT NetApp Snapshot™ technology is also Aegis Media finds itself with many copies infrastructure into a single, cohesive, highly regarded for the value it brings. of the same data. By utilizing the built-in easy-to-manage platform. Morris says, “Sixty percent of our storage data deduplication functionality within requirements are in EMEA. We regularly FlexPod, the company understood it “It’s a huge consolidation exercise, do a lot of backup and restore, and could avoid needless replication, and but one that underpins and helps drive we didn’t want this to impact the EMEA in the process, free up significant the business forward,” says Towers. business. Snapshot technology easily storage assets. “NetApp took the legacy equipment integrates with third-party tools, which and consolidated it into five data cen- enables us to protect our data with no Integration with VMware was also a com- ters, enabling us to virtualize 80% of impact on performance and at zero cost.” pelling feature, enabling the company to servers, which alone leads to significant create 3,000 virtual machines over 70 cost savings and far greater efficiency.” The FlexPod platform also helps drive physical servers. The FlexPod platform Aegis Media’s acquisition plans forward benefits from a long-standing partnership Morris adds, “We couldn’t have done it with greater efficiency and at a lower between NetApp and VMware and, without NetApp. Its technology to one cost than could be achieved with its together with Cisco, provides a flexible side, the company has been really good legacy systems. The company’s planned data center platform that is primed to at the architecture level, helping us plan doubled growth is partly based on accelerate cloud deployments. and map out the new platform.” aggressive acquisitions. For example, when Aegis Media previously acquired Morris speaks highly of the partnership 15% reduction in IT budget (for starters) a company it needed to engage at a between the three vendors and says this local level to bring it under its global IT was another key consideration in the One of the immediate benefits to be realized is a 15% decrease in Aegis umbrella. This meant sending teams of decision to deploy FlexPod: “FlexPod people to the acquired company to not only delivers a future-proofed plat- Media’s global £90 million IT budget. This savings arose from management integrate the IT systems, which could form, but we also have a single point be costly and time consuming given of accountability,” he says. “It gives us efficiencies. “We haven’t yet realized the full benefits, but we expect them that integration models differed accord- peace of mind that we have a single ing to the legacy systems. However, point of contact for service-related to be significant,” points out Towers. Substantial cost-cutting benefits the FlexPod platform now enables the issues. If we had taken the best-of- company to easily and quickly integrate breed route, we would be dealing with are expected to be reaped after the platform is fully up and running. For acquisitions through a single engage- many vendors, which would have been ment model. enormously complex. And, it would example, power consumption costs will have undermined our ability to create a fall by approximately 30%, and energy A further key benefit is the future-proof cohesive IT infrastructure that we could efficiency will improve. To date there has platform provided by FlexPod. In the “If I were to sum up the benefits of the FlexPod platform and NetApp storage backup, I’d say we’re partnering with industry-leading vendors and using their tightly integrated technologies to provide a globalized IT platform...that allows us to grow and change in line with the business and is easy to manage. In short, it enables us to empower IT and the business.” James Morris Global Architect, Aegis Media

near future, Aegis Media plans to take advantage of the flexibility offered by a SOLUTION COMPONENTS hybrid cloud model by using the cloud to FlexPod Components NetApp Software deliver services on demand. Its FlexPod NetApp FAS2240, FAS3240, NetApp Snapshot technology solution can be scaled up or down and FAS3270, FAS6240, and FAS6280 duplicated in modular fashion to meet NetApp Flash Cache unified storage systems capacity requirements. Morris says, Third-Party Products “FlexPod is flexible enough to allow us to Cisco UCS B-Series servers Cisco UCS Manager grow at our pace toward a hybrid cloud Cisco UCS 6120XP Fabric as and when we are ready to do this.” Interconnect Protocols Big data for new business Cisco UCS 2140 Fabric Extenders FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS One area in which the company is Cisco Nexus 7010 and Cisco Partner planning to use FlexPod to enhance Tata Consultancy Services its business offerings is big data. The Nexus 5596UP and 5548UP www.tcs.com improved NetApp storage management switches capabilities within FlexPod are providing Virtualization Components a foundation for big data analysis. VMware solutions “NetApp provides a vast pool of storage resources and refinement for big data,” says Morris. “We’re going to use these to “If I were to sum up the benefits of the ready for virtualized services,” Morris provide our clients with more meaningful FlexPod platform and NetApp storage adds. “We have a future-proofed plat- insights into marketing and advertising. backup, I’d say we’re partnering with form that allows us to grow and change This is a key to our growth strategy, industry-leading vendors and using in line with the business and is easy to which will strengthen existing customer their tightly integrated technologies to manage. In short, it enables us to relationships and win us new business.” provide a globalized IT platform that’s empower IT and the business.”

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