Transcript of a discussion on how Canadian non-profit SOCAN faced digital disruption and fought back with a successful storage modernizing journey.

1. How Cutting Edge Storage Provides a Competitive Footing
for Music Service Provider
Transcript of a discussion on how Canadian non-profit SOCAN faced digital disruption and
fought back with a successful storage modernizing journey.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise
(HPE) Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT
Innovation -- and how it's making an impact on people's lives.
Our next digital business transformation case study examines how Canadian
nonprofit SOCAN faced digital disruption and fought back with a successful
storage modernizing journey. We'll learn how adopting storage innovation
allows for faster responses to end-user needs and opens the door to new
business opportunities.
To describe how SOCAN gained a new competitive capability for its performance rights
management business we're joined by Trevor Jackson, Director of IT Infrastructure for SOCAN,
the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, based in Toronto.
Welcome, Trevor.
Trevor Jackson: Hi, thank you for having me.
A Tech Guide
For the Savvy
Flash Buyer
Gardner: The music business has changed a lot in the past five years or so. There are lots of
interesting things going on with licensing models and people wanting to get access to music, but
people also wanting to control their own art.
Tell us about some of the drivers for your organization, and then also about some of your
technology decisions.
Jackson: We've traditionally been handling performances of music, which is radio stations,
television and movies. Over the last 10 or 15 years, with the advent of YouTube, Spotify, Netflix,
and digital streaming services, we're seeing a huge increase in the volume of data that we have to
digest and analyze as an organization.
1
Gardner

2. Gardner: And what function do you serve? For those who are might not be familiar with your
organization or the type of organization, tell us the role you play in the music and content
industries?
Play music ethically
Jackson: At a very high level, what we do is license the use of music in Canada. What that
means is that we allow businesses through licensing to ethically play any type of music they
want within their environment. Whether it's a bar, restaurant, television station, or
a radio station, we collect the royalties on behalf of the creators of the music and
then redistribute that to them.
We're a not-for-profit organization. Anything that we don't spend on running the
business, which is the collecting, processing, and payment of those royalties,
goes back to the creators or the publishers of the music.
Gardner: When you talk about data, tell us about the type of data you collect in
order to accomplish that mission?
Jackson: It's all kinds of data. For the most part, it's unstructured. We collect it from many
different sources, again radio and television stations, and of course, YouTube is another example.
There are some standards, but one of the challenges is that we have to do data transformation to
ensure that, once we get the data, we can analyze it and it fits into our databases, so that we can
do the processing on information.
Gardner: And what sort of data volumes are we talking about here?
Jackson: We're not talking about petabytes, but the thing about performance information is that
it's very granular. For example, the files that YouTube sends to us may have billions of rows for
all the performances that are played, as they're going through their cycle through the month; it's
the same thing with radio stations.
We don't store any digital files or copies of music. It's all
performance-related information -- the song that was played and
when it was played. That's the type of information that we analyze.
Gardner: So, it's metadata about what's been going on in terms of how these
performances have been used and played. Where were you two years ago in this journey, and
how have things changed for you in terms of what you can do with the data and how
performance of your data is benefiting your business?
Jackson: We've been on flash for almost two years now. About two and a half years ago, we
realized that the storage area network (SAN) that we did have, which was a traditional tiered-
2
Jackson

3. storage array, just didn't have the throughput or the input/output operations per second (IOPS) to
handle the explosive amount of data that we were seeing.
With YouTube coming online, as well as Spotify, we knew we had to do something about that.
We had to increase our throughput.
Performance requirements
Gardner: Are you generating reports from this data at a certain frequency or is there
streaming? How is the output in terms of performance requirements?
Jackson: We ingest a lot of data from the data-source providers. We have to analyze what was
played, who owns the works that were played, correlate that with our database, and then ensure
that the monies are paid out accordingly.
Gardner: Are these reports for the generation of the money done by the hour, day, or week?
How frequently do you have to make that analysis?
Jackson: We do what we call a distribution, which is a payment of royalties, once a quarter.
When we're doing a payment on a distribution, it’s typically on performances that occurred nine
months prior to the day of the distribution.
A Tech Guide
For the Savvy
Flash Buyer
Gardner: What did you do two and a half years ago in terms of moving to flash and solid state
disk (SSD) technologies? How did you integrate that into your existing infrastructure or create
the infrastructure to accommodate that, and then what did you get for it?
Jackson: When we started looking at another solution to improve our throughput, we actually
started looking at another tiered storage array. I came to HPE Discover about two years ago and
saw the presentation on the all flash that they were talking about, the benefits of all flash for the
price of spinning disk, which was to me very intriguing.
I met with some of the HPE engineers and had a deep-dive discussion on how they were doing
this magic that they were claiming. We had a really good discussion, and when I went back to
Toronto, I also met with some HPE engineers in the Toronto offices. I brought my technical team
with me to do a bit of a deeper dive and just to kick the tires to understand fully what they were
proposing.
We came away from that meeting very intrigued and very happy with what we saw. From then
on, we made the leap to purchase the HPE storage. We've had it running for about a year and
nine months now, and it’s been running very well for us.
3

4. Gardner: What sort of metrics do you have in terms of technology, speeds and feeds, but also
metrics in terms of business value and economics?
Jackson: I don’t want to get into too much detail, but as an anecdote, we saw some processes
that we were running going from days to hours just by putting it on all flash. To us, that's a huge
improvement.
Gardner: What other benefits have you gotten? Are there some analytics benefits, backup and
recovery benefits, or data lifecycle management benefits?
OPEX perspective
Jackson: Looking at it from an OPEX perspective, because of the IOPS that we have available
to us, planning maintenance windows has actually been a lot easier for the team to work with.
Before, we would have to plan something akin to landing the space shuttle. We had to make sure
that we weren’t doing it during a certain time, because it could affect the batch processes. Then,
we'd potentially be late on our payments, our distributions. Because we have so many IOPS on
tap, we're able to do these maintenance windows within business hours. The guys are happier
because they have a greater work-life balance.
The other benefit that we saw was that all-flash uses less power than spinning disk. Because of
less power, there less heat, and a need for less floor space. Of course, speed is the number one
driving factor for a company to go all-flash.
Gardner: In terms of automation, integration, load-balancing, and some of those other benefits
that come with flash environments, were you able to use some of your IT folks for other
innovation projects, rather than speeds and feeds projects?
Jackson: When you're freeing up resources from keeping the lights on, it's adding more value to
the business. IT traditionally is a cost center, but now we can take those resources and take them
off of the day-to-day mundane tasks and put them into projects, which is what we've been doing.
We're able to add greater benefit to our members.
Gardner: And has your experience with flash in modernizing your storage prompted you to
move towards other infrastructure modernization techniques including virtualization, software-
defined composable infrastructure, maybe hyper converged? Is this an end point for you or
maybe a starting point?
Jackson: IT is always changing, always transforming, and we're definitely looking at other
technologies.
4

5. Some of the big buzzwords out there, blockchain, machine learning, and whatnot are things that
we’re looking at very closely as an organization. We know our business very well and we're
hoping to leverage that knowledge with technology to further drive our business forward.
Gardner: We're hearing a lot promising sorts of vision these days about how machine learning
could be brought to bear on things like data transformation and making that analysis better,
faster, cheaper. So, that’s a pretty interesting stuff.
Are you now looking to extend what you do? Is the technology an enabler more than a cost
center in some ways for your general SOCAN vision and mission?
Jackson: Absolutely. We're in the music business, but there is no way we can do what we do
without technology; technically it’s impossible. We're constantly looking at ways that we can
leverage what we have today, as well as what’s out in the marketplace or coming down the pipe,
to ensure that we can definitely add the value to our members to ensure that they're paid and
compensated for their hard work.
Gardner: And user experience and user quality of experience are top of mind for everybody
these days.
Jackson: Absolutely, that’s very true.
Gardner: We'll have to leave it there. We've been learning how Canadian non-profit SOCAN
faced digital disruption and fought back with a successful storage modernizing journey. And
we've heard how adopting storage innovation is allowing for faster responses to end-user needs
and has opened the door to new business opportunities.
A Tech Guide
For the Savvy
Flash Buyer
So, please join me in thanking our guest. We’ve been joined by Trevor Jackson, Director of IT
Infrastructure for SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada,
based in Toronto.
Thank you, Trevor.
Jackson: Thank you for having me.
Gardner: And I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this Hewlett-Packard
Enterprise, Voice of the Customer Podcast.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HPE-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and please come back next time.
5

6. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how Canadian non-profit SOCAN faced digital disruption and
fought back with a successful storage modernizing journey. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• How Software-defined Storage Translates into Just-In-Time Data Center Scaling
• Big data enables top user experiences and extreme personalization for Intuit TurboTax
• Feedback loops: The confluence of DevOps and big data
• Spirent leverages big data to keep user experience quality a winning factor for telcos
• Powerful reporting from YP's data warehouse helps SMBs deliver the best ad campaigns
• IoT brings on development demands that DevOps manages best, say experts
• Big data generates new insights into what’s happening in the world's tropical ecosystems
• DevOps and security, a match made in heaven
• How Sprint employs orchestration and automation to bring IT into DevOps readiness
• How fast analytics changes the game and expands the market for big data value
• How HTC centralizes storage management to gain visibility and IT disaster avoidance
• Big data, risk, and predictive analysis drive use of cloud-based ITSM, says panel
• Rolta AdvizeX experts on hastening big data analytics in healthcare and retail
• The future of business intelligence as a service with GoodData and HP Vertica
6