Published on 05 Jun 2009
"Efficiency is the priority factor when we invest in IT. The solution we chose had to be highly reliable, cost-effective, able to integrate with our legacy IT components, and able to flexibly address ad-hoc business requirements. The IBM XIV Storage System has given us all this." - JinSoo Lee, CIO, JoongAng Ilbo
Customer:
JoongAng Ilbo
Industry:
Media & Entertainment
Deployment country:
Korea - Republic of
Solution:
IT/infrastructure
IBM Business Partner:
Haywardtech Corporation
Overview
Established in 1965 by the founder of Samsung Group, JoongAng Ilbo is practically a household name in Korea. Headquartered in Seoul and employing approximately 700 people, the company publishes Korea’s leading daily newspaper, with a circulation of almost two million.
Business need:
The company needed to resolve the systems management workload and overall performance issues they were experiencing with the company’s existing storage platform. They wanted to find a reliable solution that would be easy to manage and that would deliver consistent high performance.
Solution:
With the help of IBM Business Partner Haywardtech Corporation of Korea, JoongAng Ilbo replaced their existing storage system with an IBM XIV® storage system with 25 TB of storage space. The system is configured in 60 storage volumes to support the company’s Oracle database and numerous enterprise applications, and serves as many as 3,500 concurrent users.
Benefits:
The IBM XIV solution delivers consistent performance, even during peak production times, offers simpler administration, which enables reduced IT labor costs, and enables new levels of business efficiency and improved customer satisfaction.
Case Study
Founded in 1965, JoongAng Ilbo is a leading Korean media publishing company, producing one of Korea’s top three dailies, JoongAng Daily (circulation two million), and numerous magazines. Through a business alliance with the International Herald Tribune, JoongAng Ilbo also publishes that paper in Korea, along with an English translation of its daily. JoongAng Ilbo’s parent company, JMnet (JoongAng Media Network), is the publisher of Newsweek Korea and Forbes Korea.
Delivering high-quality data and services
Like most large enterprises, JoongAng Ilbo relies on its IT infrastructure to deliver high-quality data and services to meet its business needs. Needing to upgrade capacity on its existing Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) storage, the JoongAng IT team took the time to investigate new solutions.
“A newspaper organization typically pushes its IT infrastructure to the limits at month-end, quarter-end, and year-end,” explains SK Kim, storage manager at JoongAng Ilbo: “With our previous storage system, we often had poor response times at peak points in the day, and particularly at our most business-critical times.”
“Our ability to provide quality services—on time—is critical to the success of our business,” says JinSoo Lee, CIO of JoongAng Ilbo, “because it results in higher quality services for our subscribers, our sponsors, and our employees.”
IBM XIV: Addressing all needs while saving costs
After evaluating solutions from EMC, HDS and others JoongAng Ilbo chose the IBM XIV® Storage System. They joined forces with IBM Business Partner Haywardtech Corporation—a distributor of XIV storage in Korea known for its storage expertise—for planning, implementation, training and maintenance.
“Originally, we aimed to simply upgrade our existing storage capacity,” recalls SK Kim. “Guided by Haywardtech's industry knowledge and understanding of our pains, we came to realize that the IBM XIV Storage System could clear up all of our problems. We understood that the XIV system’s unique architecture and other features could deliver the sustained high performance we sought, regardless of the many changes that transpire in the storage environment over time.”
JoongAng tested the candidate systems for performance. Recalls JinSoo Lee, “We evaluated SQL queries using the SQLIO performance test tool. The XIV system performed more than two and a half times faster than comparable systems.”
“Efficiency is the priority factor when we invest in IT,” he adds. “The solution we chose had to be highly reliable, cost-effective, able to integrate with our legacy IT components, and able to flexibly address ad-hoc business requirements. The IBM XIV Storage System has given us all this. IBM XIV’s built-in software offering—virtualization, snapshots, management, and so forth—was also a decisive differentiator.”
Problem-free performance
JoongAng Ilbo replaced its existing storage unit with an XIV storage system. The system is configured in 60 storage volumes to support the company’s many enterprise applications, including CRM, billing, MIS, Groupware, Microsoft® Exchange, and media portal applications. JoongAng Ilbo runs an Oracle database on Microsoft Windows Server, while backup and archiving is provided by Networker. The infrastructure supports as many as 3,500 concurrent users.
JoongAng Ilbo conducted a one-month proof of concept before committing to the XIV platform. After just a few hours of instruction, the media publisher’s storage team was well equipped to manage and maintain the new system.
“We changed over from our legacy system to XIV in a single day,” recalls SK Kim. “We’ve now been up and running for a year and a half without a single problem. What more can I say?”
Exceptional stability, enhancing customer satisfaction
JoongAng Ilbo has realized numerous IT and, ultimately, business benefits since implementing XIV storage. “With XIV, we are enjoying great improvements in system reliability, batch processing time, and data volumes allocation,” reports JinSoo Lee. “We’ve also removed bottlenecks during peak production, which had long been a thorn in our side. We now have new levels of business efficiency, which translates to improved customer satisfaction.”
SK Kim agrees. “We now have consistent performance 24x365, including during financial cut-off periods. Company end users can access the information they need at any time, any day of the year. With IBM XIV, we have an exceptionally stable storage system, even in unforeseen circumstances. When the power went out during building renovations, we didn’t lose a single piece of data.”
Groundbreaking user experience
Easy storage management, delivered through the simple and intuitive XIV user interface, has enabled the media publisher to reduce administrative overhead significantly. Said SK Kim of the XIV user interface: “Fantastic—it’s a groundbreaking tool.”
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/xiv/
For more information about JoongAng Ilbo, visit: joongangdaily.joins.com
For more information about Haywardtech Corporation, visit: www.haywardtech.com
Components
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware:
Storage: XIV
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 IBM Systems and Technology Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America May 2009 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and XIV are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. IBM and Haywardtech Corporation of Korea are separate companies and each is responsible for its own products. Neither IBM nor Haywardtech Corporation of Korea makes any warranties, express or implied, concerning the other’s products. References in this publication to IBM products, programs or services do not imply that IBM intends to make these available in all countries in which IBM operates. Any reference to an IBM product, program or service is not intended to imply that only IBM’s product, program or service may be used. Any functionally equivalent product, program or service may be used instead. Offerings are subject to change, extension or withdrawal without notice. All client examples cited represent how some clients have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Performance data for IBM and non-IBM products and services contained in this document was derived under specific operating and environmental conditions. The actual results obtained by any party implementing such products or services will depend on a large number of factors specific to such party’s operating environment and may vary significantly. IBM makes no representation that these results can be expected or obtained in any implementation of any such products or services. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.
Document options
Stay informed
