oOh!media manages data growth with Hitachi SAN infrastructure

Outdoor shopping centre signs and large-format billboards all form part of Australia’s $427 million out-of-home advertising industry. Within this sector, oOh!media Group, operating from offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney, produces and sends large data files to and from its other offices and clients.

The biggest challenge for the company is to ensure its storage capacity keeps pace with its increasing data usage. In just 12 months, oOh!media’s data inventory tripled from just over one terabyte to three terabytes, meaning the business had almost reached its maximum storage capacity.

“We keep photographic records of all our outdoor billboard campaigns and signage, which are all in high-resolution format,” said Simon Yeandle, Chief Financial Officer, oOh!media. “We also need to provide clients with proof of posting for all new campaigns, and that alone means up to 8000 photos per fortnight coming in and out of the business. As a result, we were tripling our storage year on year, and our infrastructure simply couldn’t keep up.”

“Media file sizes are also growing substantially - not twofold, but fourfold. This, coupled with a change in media format from static to multimedia, is further increasing file sizes. In some cases the file sizes were so large that we would run out of disk space and the network would fail, resulting in downtime of at least three hours for each incident. That downtime could result in massive costs to the business and would put us at risk of losing vital data and business development opportunities in the process. It just wasn’t sustainable.”

oOh!media outsources all of its network IT requirements to Regal Information Technology, which recommended considering a storage area network infrastructure. Regal Information Technology deployed the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2100 - a reliable, scalable storage system that provides enterprise-grade performance to manage the company’s data and other business applications, and enable virtualisation of its existing servers. Hitachi’s TrueCopy software - a remote mirroring feature built into the AMS 2100 that saves data to the primary and secondary site simultaneously - would also provide oOh!media with the ability to create a disaster recovery site in the near future.

“We were looking for a storage area network that would virtualise and better utilise oOh!media’s existing servers, as well as provide additional storage capacity,” said David Cleminson, Technical Director at Regal Information Technology. “The AMS 2100 provides the business with stability from a redundancy perspective, high data availability across all its offices and reduced downtime for system maintenance. The Hitachi solution has increased storage capacity from just over three terabytes to 17 terabytes and also provides the ability to scale storage upwards and outwards with extra capacity and performance, quickly adapting with oOh!media’s exponential and sometimes erratic data growth.”

“If we had stayed with our existing infrastructure, there is no way we could have continued to grow as a business,” says Yeandle. “Once you reach your data limit, this starts to have serious repercussions on business processes and performance. Since implementing the Hitachi AMS solution we’re no longer restricted, have removed the risk to our business and now have the performance and scalability to handle whatever file sizes are coming into the business.”

oOh!media has plans to use its Hitachi central storage solution to replicate data between two SANs, so they have a disaster recovery solution in place. This will provide the organisation with a business continuity plan that provides greater stability and peace of mind.