Storage became the defining element of Soundbuzz Pte Ltd.?s business 18 to 20 months ago, when the launch of Apple?s iTunes triggered off a change in licensing regimes for the recording industry and unleashed digital music onto the market.

Formed in 1999, Soundbuzz promotes and distributes digital music through online and wireless partners across Southeast Asia, India, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

?Digital music is the core of our business, it is inherent in every single thing that we do,? said Soundbuzz?s chief executive Sudhanshu Sarronwala. ?We take content, process, protect and host it. We provide music in different formats such as AAC, MP3, Windows Media Player for different delivery channels, online and mobile.?

Currently, Soundbuzz has more than 600,000 music files in its database and more than 25,000 ringtones. This phenomenal growth is set to continue: Soundbuzz expects to have more than a million tracks in its database by the end of next year.

?For the next 12 to 15 months, we will have 3 million songs in our database. A pentabyte of storage is within reason if you look at 3G and the multiple formats that we have to store.?

Not surprisingly, storage is the single biggest part of the company?s IT budget.

Soundbuzz needed an external storage architecture capable of providing the reliability and scalability it needed to keep up with its high service level agreements and growth.

The company?s storage environment not only has to accept the surge of raw music files uploaded onto its storage systems from the different record labels, it also has to handle the torrent of data flowing out in response to customer requests to both streaming music samples and music downloads.

As the Soundbuzz business model entails the servicing of multiple client music stores using the core backend, access to the Soundbuzz database is key to the basic functioning of all music stores.

Reliability is therefore important as Soundbuzz powers 50 music stores accessible by more than 50 million users on a daily basis, said Sarronwala.

The company also needed a storage infrastructure that would enable it to handle the unpredictability of the online music business.

Since its data needs were fluid and could not be estimated accurately given the emerging nature of the industry, it needed a solution that would allow it to conserve cost and plan scalability, said Sarronwala.

?The critical decision was whether to buy the whole house straight up or to build it from the ground. We chose to build it,? he said.

Soundbuzz went with the EMC Clariion CX500 platform which now hosts the company?s growing database of music content, customer information, and media files for its media server, providing continuous availability and data integrity, including online LUN (logical unit) expansion for increased information availability.

The new system can scale from 180GB to 12TB and the storage can be upgraded modularly and online without affecting existing data. In addition, the model can be upgraded to the next generation without affecting the data stored.