Tata Sky Ltd.

Indian Satellite Television Company Delivers Exceptional Service Levels with Eco-Friendly Sun Infrastructure

Incorporated in 2004, Tata Sky is an India based joint venture between Tata Group and STAR. Tata Sky offers Indian viewers a world-class television viewing experience through its direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television service. In addition to new channels and exciting interactive features, Tata Sky offers all popular television channels, acting as a one-stop shop for the television entertainment needs of its customers.

Customer Challenges

Joint venture in competitive market
High service level standards
Speed of company growth

Solution

Tata Sky selected Sun to provide the technology infrastructure to power its direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television service in India. Sun technology is delivering high performance, energy efficient systems, ensuring maximum up-time, fault recovery and load management, while reducing costs.

Business Results

Achieved 20 percent cost savings due to Sun's Eco-efficient technology infrastructure
Ensured 99.99 percent availability
Recorded 88 percent customer satisfaction rating

Products and Services

Story Details

A young joint venture, Tata Sky wanted to invest in building a high quality digital infrastructure to offer a superior pay television services to Indian households. Aiming to become India's largest digital television platform, Tata Sky offers consumers a wide array of programming choices with interactive features and superior picture and sound quality. Within this competitive industry, it is critical for Tata Sky to deliver exceptional customer service and high customer enablement.

To establish its business in India, Tata Sky deployed business support applications including Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, Kenan FX billing software, and SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application suite. The company wanted its technology infrastructure to work seamlessly with its software vendors and Oracle database while offering reliability, high scalability and flexibility to meet a high projected company growth.

" We need 99.9 percent availability because our customers expect high levels of service, 24 hours a day. Sun Gold Support and the Sun infrastructure has met our expectations of system reliability, and definitely helped us exceed industry service level standards. "

— Chakrapani Perangur, CIO, TataSky

Tata Sky selected Sun to provide its technological infrastructure, due to the reliability of Sun hardware and its ability to support multiple vendor software applications. One of Sun's largest partners in India, Tata Consulting Services was involved in establishing the infrastructure and now provide outsourcing IT services to support Tata Sky. In the lead up to the launch, Sun Services provided installation, engineering expertise and support to the company.

Tata Sky is powered by a combination of Sun Fire E20K servers running UltraSPARC(R) IV+-based processors, Sun T2000 servers, and Sun Fire V240 and Sun Fire V440 servers. Sun Fire E20K server scales up to 36 processors, executing up to 72 simultaneous compute threads, and supports up to 576 GB of memory for commercial applications, to enable TataSky to scale its computing capacity to meet its strong growth projections.

The Sun Netra T2000 servers feature the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology. T2000 servers deliver up to 32 simultaneous execution threads and 64 GB memory in a rack-optimized 2RU enclosure drawing typically 275 watts of power, providing TataSky with the best energy-efficient performance of any processor available. Deploying the eco-friendly high performing Sun technology infrastructure has resulted in a 20% cost savings for the company.

All servers run Solaris 9 or Solaris 10 Operating System and key servers use Sun Cluster 3.1 to ensure maximum up-time, fault recovery and load management. Data is stored, managed and backed up on two Sun StorageTek 9990 systems, each with a total raw capacity of 14TB. These systems run Sun StorageTek 9900 ShadowImage In-System Replication for disaster recovery and data movement, and Sun StorageTek 9900 Universal Volume Manager for optimal storage virtualization and data lifecycle management.

Tata Sky deployed two Sun StorageTek 6130 arrays, each with a total raw capacity of one TB, and a single Sun StorageTek 6130 array with a total raw capacity of 16TB. The StorageTek 6140 is a four gigabits-per-second (Gb/sec) Fibre Channel (FC) array offering Tata Sky both direct attached and SAN attached storage. The Sun StorageTek C4 Tape libraries uses LTO 3 tape drives, and the Sun StorageTek SL500 modular library system for data backups has four tape drives and 50 cartridge slots, providing Tata Sky with modular scalability and extreme density to reduce data center space and costs.

Sun StorageTek 5310 NAS provides Tata Sky with purpose-built, enterprise-class dedicated file sharing services to storage area networks for a unified block and file storage consolidation solution. Tata Sky is able to consolidate NAS and SAN-based storage into a single, integrated storage pool, helping to significantly reduce IT cost and complexity. Tata Sky deployed Six Brocade 4100 Switches with 32 active ports to provide high-speed, robust storage networks to access and share data in a high-performance, manageable, and scalable manner.

To match its business need for 99.9 percent system availability, the company chose the Sun Gold Service Plan, which provides 24x7 fully-integrated hardware and Solaris 10 Operating System service coverage to ensure there is no downtime and corresponding affect on customer service levels.

Tata Sky has achieved an increase in customer satisfaction ratings, which the company partially attributes to its Sun solutions. Tata Sky has achieved higher percentage of customer satisfaction than the industry standards.