Keeping in mind fast paced business dynamics in the retail segment, Bangalore based Myntra Designs was looking forward to create an IT enabled innovative edge that can help the company grow positively, and it found the answer in the form of Netmagic’s Datacenter Infrastructure.
The company started off in the business of personalization of products. In 2010, the company shifted its strategy to becoming a B2C (business to customer) oriented firm, expanding its catalogue to fashion and lifestyle products.
The B2C shift – towards end customers – called for devising a simple and effective ways to reach out to customers, innovative payment models such as cash-on-delivery. The website, Myntra.com, was redesigned to suit the need of online shoppers, making it more consumer friendly.
IT that runs these service offerings at Myntra is at the heart of the company’s business operations. The IT team develops all applications internally, that forms the backbone of all the services offered to end-users. “IT operations and IT infrastructure are very critical business parts for us at Myntra”, says Shamik Sharma, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Myntra Designs.
“IT in Myntra is divided into two parts essentially. On one part is the ecommerce portal – the visible part when consumers come to the site to buy online. On the backend is the Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERP), that automates all our business processes – warehouse management, deliveries management, inventory system that tells us how many items we have in stock, reorder times and talks to our suppliers as well,” says Shamik.
On the infrastructure side, Myntra was initially hosted at Amazon AWS center at Singapore. In 2011 they moved their entire customer facing applications and servers to Netmagic’s data center facility at Mumbai. They host about 80 servers – of different configurations.
Within the farm of servers that are hosted at Netmagic data center, about one third of them are used as web servers for serving the ecommerce portal.
CHALLENGES for Myntra
The key challenge facing Myntra when they were hosted at the Amazon center at Singapore was network latency. “The main challenge we saw was network latency, network robustness and reliability. What happens in the previous setup was that every user accessing the site from India had to be routed to Singapore that adds quite a bit of latency, and thus adversely affecting user experience,” claims Shamik.
The second challenge or factor prompting Myntra to move to an Indian facility was network reliability and robustness. “The network connection is not only slower, had higher down time and not predictable at the older facility. This was another big challenge for us,” says Shamik.
The move to Indian based service provider was imminent for Myntra.
The company also wanted better control over its infrastructure that was proving to be difficult to handle at the Singapore facility. “We wanted more control on what infrastructure we run our business on – the ability to choose specific server types. Also, we had limited control – though there were many configurations available to choose from, we could not customize it to the degree we wanted,” explains Shamik.
The Solution
It was then, back in 2011, that Myntra took the decision to move its entire infrastructure to India – to Netmagic’s data center facility at Mumbai. “It was very easy decision for us to use Netmagic because we had heard very good things about them and they really satisfied all our primary and secondary concerns,” says Shamik.
“We have now about 80 servers at Netmagic data center all managed on an OPEX model by them. Netmagic directly talk to our suppliers – such as Dell – and procure the desired infrastructure piece for us. We pay on a monthly basis thus not having to incur capital expenditure,” explains Shamik.
They have software-based load balancers that help ease the pressure on various servers. “We use a couple of servers for load balancing and on the network side have firewalls to secure the website,” says Shamik.
Some servers are virtualized and used for development work – developers work on virtual instances for their jobs. And a server runs the caching service.
On redundancy of the website and the applications, Shamik says “we are working with Netmagic to include cross data center BCP (business continuity planning) or HA (high availability). What we do within Netmagic facility is that we have load balancers, firewalls and partitions across clusters. If one server goes down we can use other. We also take regular snapshots – frequency of every 6 hours – of our database and apps on to a parallel setup so that we can bring it back up there at short notice.”
“We are piloting Netmagic’s on-demand capability currently which helps us manage traffic during high peaks times,” claims Shamik.
BENEFITS derived
One of the most important benefits of moving their infrastructure to Netmagic’s Mumbai data center is that it dramatically lowered their latency issue. “Latency of services is down by 20-25% overall after moving to Netmagic’s Mumbai Data Center. Our website show up on user’s page in almost 2 seconds whereas it used to take almost 3 seconds earlier,” exclaims, Chief Technology and Product Officer, Shamik.
Another key benefit that Myntra enjoys today is better reliability and higher availability at the network infrastructure side. “We used to have a few hours of network issue each month at the previous facility which we have been able to address successfully now,” claims Shamik. “Also, we have been able to completely address customer issues of slow connections and slow page loads – a dramatic improvement in reliability and robustness of our infrastructure,” he adds.