Postmedia Powers Media Strategy With EMC-Based Private Cloud

EMC Corporation announced that Postmedia Network Inc., the largest publisher by circulation of paid English-language daily newspapers in Canada, has embarked on a journey to transform its IT infrastructure and create private cloud with the help of EMC technologies and services.

Over the past three years, Postmedia has transformed its IT Infrastructure to create a more agile, scalable and powerful Infrastructure. It is moving toward delivering IaaS to the business and support innovation and growth.

Customer Benefits:

• Performance – With EMC Global Services, Postmedia has seen a 1,400X improvement in the performance of its IT infrastructure.
• Improved Utilization – It has increased storage utilization, enabling the company to scale as business demands for digital news and applications grow while sustaining high performance.
• Reduced Costs – Since implementing a FLASH 1st strategy, it has increased performance and efficiency, while lowering storage costs by nearly 35%.
• Improved Data Protection – Postmedia has lowered its recovery time by almost 85% recovering critical applications, such as Exchange, in just seven minutes with EMC RecoverPoint instead of up to 45 minutes with its previous solution.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
Like many publishers today, Postmedia had to confront structural changes in the industry such as the flight of advertising revenues to the Internet giants. Competition has been fierce from traditional publishers in Canada who are wrestling with the same issues, but also from digital properties that spin up with the seeming ease of a virtual machine. In this challenging economic environment all areas of the business were expected to improve efficiencies where possible, including IT.

Traditional approaches to delivering IT had to be revamped. The task was to replace aging infrastructure with a technology refresh that would simultaneously reduce business risk and improve agility.

Postmedia worked with EMC to implement a private cloud infrastructure built on VNX and VNXe unified storage, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, Cisco networking and VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies.

The VNX is configured with a FLASH 1st strategy using the EMC FAST Suite, including FAST Cache and FAST VP, along with flash and high-capacity HDDs. Postmedia leverages its VNXe’s to support its newspaper editorial business application at remote sites with EMC’s Unisphere Remote. The solution has increased performance, enabled business agility, and produced cost savings.

Postmedia relies on VNX for its full suite of mission-critical applications, including Exchange. To protect and recover these business-critical systems, Postmedia has deployed Data Domain deduplication storage systems and EMC RecoverPoint remote data protection.

Mark Boucher, VP Technical Services, Postmedia Network, said:" We had to evolve and fundamentally change our whole architecture to live within the constraints of the data centre walls without adding operational cost. Postmedia’s cloud decision was born out of both business transformation and constraints, but cloud infrastructure was also expected to deliver a more resilient environment with less maintenance and support.

"Our IT environment needed to move at the same fast pace that our business moves. With EMC, we were able to transform our IT infrastructure and move to a more innovative and agile environment.

"EMC has been a strong partner for us. They not only deliver a comprehensive set of products to support our business, but they bring a number of capabilities and support to bring value to our organization. Services from EMC have also been phenomenal."

Anil Sedha, Midrange Services & Storage supervisor, Postmedia Network, said:" With the help of EMC Consulting, we saw a 1,400X improvement in I/O along with an improvement in storage utilization, providing more scalability.

"With RecoverPoint, we’re able to recover critical applications like Exchange in just seven minutes instead of up to 45 minutes as in the past. We can have our entire application environment back online in about 15 minutes and with minimal disruption to our journalists and 24×7 news stream."