Server and Data Storage Migration

Executive Summary

Entertainment Partners is the largest outsourcing provider of payroll, budgeting, and production scheduling services within the entertainment industry. With over 27 years of experience, Entertainment Partners owns the majority marketshare of the production outsourcing services marketplace and has helped clients deliver large production projects on time and under budget. With the profitability of movies depending upon accurate production schedules and cost management, Entertainment Partners is “always in the picture.”

The Challenge
Entertainment Partners business model has changed dramatically over the last 10 years in an effort to support the information and business growth requirements of the entertainment industry. To begin, faced with exponential data storage growth, Entertainment Partners needed to scale data storage capacities to meet the business needs of existing entertainment customers. Second, to stay competitive within the entertainment marketplace, Entertainment Partners needed to improve its competitive position by developing a rapid deployment capability for new Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications. Third, Entertainment Partners sought to reduce its IT operating costs and avoid costs associated with additional IT infrastructure and personnel costs.

Barriers
Barriers to these three strategic initiatives included: a heterogeneous server environment based on a proprietary UNIX operating system, obsolete direct attached storage (DAS) disk-based architecture not capable of supporting future data storage needs in a cost-effective manner, and an existing Informix Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) lacking in functionality and pending end of life by IBM.

The Solution
Entertainment Partners’ relationship with Symantec Corporation (formerly VERITAS Software) dates back to the mid 1990s, when it implemented Veritas NetBackup and Veritas Storage Foundation software. In late 2001, seeking to embark on its migration to a next-generation datacenter architecture, the entertainment leader leveraged Portable Data Containers in Storage Foundation software to migrate to a robust Storage Area Network (SAN) environment based on a Hitachi Data System Lightning 9900V series system. The company subsequently added a Hitachi Thunder 9500V series system. In late 2004, Entertainment Partners initiated a process to migrate varied applications residing on a legacy Sequent NUMA-Q architecture to IBM xSeries servers running the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 9.0 operating system. The migration was streamlined—with no interruptions to operations or the production environment—using Veritas Storage Foundation for Linux.

Summary of Benefits
The datacenter and data protection solutions from Symantec produced tangible business value for Entertainment Partners. The business value breaks into four areas:
• Eliminated Disk Outages: Through the elimination of disk outages impacting front office productivity and system administrator maintenance time, Entertainment Partners is saving an estimated US$728,000 over three years.
• Reduced QA Time: The ability to test over 835 accounting and payroll applications in a fully functional mirrored production environment reduced QA test time by 50%, thus resulting in an estimated savings of US$337,000 from years 2005 through 2007.
• Increased Productivity: The migration to the new IBM xSeries server environment increased system administrator productivity by 60%, thereby producing a savings of US$601,000 from years 2005 through 2007.
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership: Migration to the new IBM xSeries® server environment provided a 35% decrease in facility, maintenance, and operating costs, with an annual total cost of savings (TCO) impact of US$344,000 from years 2005 through 2007.

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