Customer Background

Beijing Gehua CATV Network Co., Ltd. (“Gehua Cable”) was established in September 1999 with approval of the Beijing Municipal People’s Government. It is authorized to build, develop, operate, manage, and maintain the cable radio and television network in Beijing, and to carry out radio and television program relay and transmission, video-on-demand, live broadcasting, and network information services. It is one of the network companies in China that transmit the largest number of digital TV and HD TV programs.

Customer Requirements

Seizing the trend of three-network convergence, Gehua Cable is driving service innovation and using network construction and technical operations to keep the cable TV network running. At the same time, to adapt to three-network integration, it is advancing next-generation broadcasting, launching new media services, and transforming from a technology operator to a service operator. As new applications have gone live, Gehua Cable’s original data-storage system has faced new challenges. It therefore needed a unified new-media platform that can expand on demand, is highly shared, reliable, high-performance, and stable. Main technical requirements were:

1. Use advanced virtualization to build an interconnected, highly shared, secure, reliable, high-performance storage system that supports interactive applications;

2. Make full use of existing equipment and complete concurrent expansion for on-demand and time-shift, multimedia applications, and HD interactive applications;

3. Use a parallel architecture combining advanced storage, network communications, and data-management technologies to provide a stable, reliable, easy-to-manage storage architecture for multiple applications, and to lay a solid platform foundation for future technologies and businesses;

4. Use parallel data-repair technology so that data on failed disks can be repaired quickly, with repair time per TB of less than one hour;

Solution

Sugon ParaStor distributed cloud storage is an enterprise-class high-end cloud storage system with proprietary intellectual property, designed for massive unstructured data. After expansion, the system provides 3 PB of effective massive storage and 40 GB/s of high-speed bandwidth. Gehua Cable upper-layer applications access the cloud storage through NAS, POSIX, RESTful, HDFS, and other protocols, helping Gehua Cable quickly build storage as a service and fully meeting the needs of the unified new-media platform.

Solution Advantages

Advanced functions such as QoS and tiering, customized for broadcasting and media, both guarantee constant bandwidth for nonlinear-editing data and automatically tier hot and cold data, resolving the customer’s existing storage-architecture difficulties.

1. Massive capacity, elastic expansion

The cluster has 3 PB of total effective capacity. ParaStor distributed cloud storage can scale to EB-class capacity, meeting concurrent storage of massive HD video sources. A high-end cloud storage system based on ParaStor scale-out storage can reach up to 80% raw disk utilization and avoid wasting network bandwidth on copying files back and forth among storage islands.

2. Outstanding performance, linear growth

Sugon ParaStor distributed cloud storage uses an all-IP architecture and supports 10GE/40GE/Infiniband networking. Tests with Gehua Cable application software far exceeded business requirements. ParaStor supports up to 30 million files in a single directory, meeting retrieval and read needs for massive data file blocks from video providers in the 4K HD era.

3. Secure and reliable, fast repair

ParaStor uses a fully redundant design with no single point or single-link failure, ensuring reliability. Erasure coding protects data so that any 4 disks or 4 storage nodes can fail while the system still serves upper-layer applications without data loss. Recovery time for 1 TB of data is less than 30 minutes.

4. Unified management, simple operations

ParaStor provides unified web management with fine-grained real-time monitoring of CPU, memory, network, and other cluster resources, plus automatic alerting. It also has self-healing, with no need for manual intervention, greatly lowering management and usage cost.

Customer Benefits

Gehua Cable’s “all-media application aggregation cloud service platform” fully supports new media. On this platform, the company connects to the internet, the mobile internet, and cable networks nationwide, providing users with all-media services across networks, terminals, and regions, including Yunfeishi, cloud communications, cloud gaming, cloud storage, cloud search, and cloud payment, meeting mobile, fragmented, and diverse user needs.