Sony India Software Centre Accelerates Decision-Making and Insights with Optimized Cloud Data Platform on AWS

Sony India Software Centre (SISCPL) was set up as a subsidiary of Sony India in 1997 and envisioned to grow as Sony's Global Competency Centre for product engineering and IT solutions development. To ensure decision-making aligns with global corporate goals, Sony personnel rely on cloud technology. More than 100 executives globally at Sony, for example, analyze reports from its Cloud Data Platform (CDP) for insights on sales, financials, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) that ensure the subsidiary meets its objectives.

However, the executives utilizing the CDP encountered challenges in accessing various reports and analyses promptly, constraining their ability to make informed decisions. The CDP team discovered data growth, which averages around 40 GB a month, was impacting the platform’s performance, causing data-warehouse CPU utilization to hit 80 percent. Mihir Kumar, CDP technical manager at Sony India, says, “This situation led to queries being aborted or taking longer time to complete, prompting alerts within the team and resulting in the failure to generate scheduled reports.”

When Sony India sought an operational review of its CDP, which relies on Amazon Redshift for its cloud data warehouse, the business turned to AWS. The review revealed the need to upgrade the Amazon Redshift Dense Compute (DC2) nodes that were responsible for compute and local solid-state drive data storage. "We realized that just adding DC2 nodes wouldn't suffice because a significant portion of the added storage capacity would be consumed by data distribution while leader node CPU capacity remained the same. Cursor queries were impacted incrementally as they are directly dependent on leader node CPU capacity," explains Kumar.

To enhance performance and accommodate data growth effectively, Sony India’s AWS technical account manager (TAM) proposed migrating to Amazon Redshift RA3 instances with managed storage. Adopting this instance type meant Sony India could independently scale compute and storage resources and prioritize query performance while offloading storage responsibilities to Amazon Redshift Managed Storage services.

After conducting rigorous tests, the CDP team decided to migrate Sony's data warehouse to four Amazon Redshift RA3.xlplus nodes, deviating from the two Amazon Redshift RA3.4xlplus nodes planned initially. According to Kumar, "AWS provided us valuable support and optimization suggestions. Opting for xlplus nodes over 4xlplus nodes was a strategic choice that resulted in annual cost savings of approximately $25,000 across two accounts. This helped to keep the budget within limits.” Additionally, with the implementation of Amazon Redshift RA3 nodes, the CDP team increased platform storage capacity from 2.5 to 128 TB, providing ample storage to meet its future needs.

Sony collaborated with AWS Enterprise Support to achieve its project objectives. This resulted in a seamless migration process, facilitated by effective communication and coordination. Throughout the migration, AWS provided essential architectural and operational guidance. "Our migration proceeded smoothly, thanks to AWS Technical Account Managers who were available throughout the staging and production migrations. We appreciate their efforts in ensuring that support executives were also present during our activities to prevent any support delays," says Kumar.