From a single branch operation in 1974 to a Rs. 2500 Crores, 465 Branches and 5000 employees financial services behemoth, Shriram Chits Pvt Ltd. (Shriram Chits) is a story of a metamorphosis that not many businesses experience in their lifetime. Needless to say, the data explosion that ensued across the dispersed locations/branches was a nightmare to be dealt to be dealt to make this success story a reality. Consolidating all applications into a single environment and streamlining back-ups through Snapshot technology, Shriram Chits  ensured data protection and improved utilisation of existing resources, while enabling the management concentrate on its growth strategy without worrying about the data woes.

Distributed Storage: Disaster In-Waiting

Even as the company was growing, its IT systems lagged behind. It was still on an archaic IT storage platform with a distributed environment with customer information being stored across regional and divisional offices. Loss of any server holding any form of data could potentially derail and cripple the business. Simply put, it was a disaster waiting to happen. Furthermore, the databases were stored at various regional and divisional offices.

"The company was not on a centralised storage system with data residing in a distributed environment in various servers, making it difficult for us to manage operations in a distributed environment,” says Sreejit Narayan, GM – IT, Shriram Chits.

The core application data was processed on the legacy tape drives viz. Digital Audio Tape (DAT), and the regional office data was managed on the locally available applications. To add to the woes, each of the applications was running on different Operating Systems.

Mounting Back-Up Challenges

Data consolidation was the pressing need of the hour. Even as the IT team realised that, the in-house data consolidation drive at the regional and divisional offices was full of complex tangles when data had to be collated from discreet systems. Back-up was a big issue at every instance. There were even intermittent events of data loss. Some ad hoc back-ups were conducted, however the required back-up policy was not instituted. The storage capacities were also were under utilised.

Making Storage Manageable

After wide ranging negotiations with multiple vendors, Shriram Chits  partnered with American Megatrends (AMI). The company implemented StorTrends iTX storage servers from AMI which consolidated all applications into a single environment, thus warranting data protection and also improving the utilisation of available resources. Hitherto they remained heavily underutilised due to distributed management. The Snapshot technology and the Wide Area Data Services (WDS) Protocol (WDS Protocol gives less latency and better performance for the data replication process between the primary site and the DR site compared to the TCP/IP Protocol), were features that turned the decision in favour of AMI.

Shriram Chits has deployed two StorTrends 1300i units – one at the DR site and the other at the datacentre. The storage suite also includes ‘Safetrends’ – Continuous Data Protection (CDP) software that backs-up certain critical filtered files for extra protection. It cost the company Rs. 4 lakh per box for the storage solution.

StorTrends 1300i unit in datacentre was setup in a Snap-assisted Replication (SAR) mode with another 1300i unit placed in the branch office of Shriram Chits (also in Chennai – but about 5-6 km from the datacentre). Periodic snapshots were scheduled in the primary site and these snapshots were then replicated to the DR site using efficient bandwidth reduction techniques like de-duplication and compression apart from transport via intelligent network protocols.

Snapshot Comes To Back-Up Rescue

Jaiprakash, Regional Manager, Shriram Chits considers the Snapshot technology as the key highlight of the storage solution. Snapshot technology takes the snapshots or image of the data and transfers the image file onto a secondary server. This is more advantageous when compared to the usual data back-up methodologies as snapshots improve space utilisation and performance. The ease and flexibility with which these operations can be performed gives it an upper hand over the other technologies.
 
The solution is based on Redirect-on-write (ROW) technology for snapshot creation. This is a more efficient way of snapshot creation compared to the Copy-on-write (COW) technology, where snapshot gets copied elsewhere and on every subsequent write event, a snapshot of a separate copy of data is generated and copied while the original data is allowed to be changed. With ROW, a master snapshot is taken for every write, which is saved at a separate location. There is no ‘copy’ of data, thereby reducing the number of Input/Output (I/Os) in the process. For every write event – while there will be two to three extra I/Os generated in case of COW, there would be none in ROW. Considering there are thousands of I/Os happening in certain transaction-heavy verticals, it makes a significant difference in reducing the processing time of every write event.

Another advantage that ROW technology offers is a higher number of snapshots, which means in case of any eventuality finer points of recovery can be sought after.

Peace Of Mind And ROI

"The primary benefit is that our minds are cleared of the constant threat of data loss incidents reported by local officers at regional offices," explains Narayan. In fact, the cost-benefit calculation in terms of ROI achievement took Narayan by surprise. Snapshots does not clog the networks while replicating data because the information exchange sessions are composed of snaps and not bytes. Considering the cost of bandwidth, snapshots proved to be a cost saver in terms of bandwidth utilisation.

Future Roadmap

Shriram Chits is in the process of implementing a private cloud for the company’s branches. This will help in further streamlining the data storage and management, so that the company can go about furthering its drive of ‘empowering people through prosperity’ worry-free.