Customer Background

China Network Television (CNTV), operated by CCTV International Network Co., Ltd., is the national online radio and television broadcasting institution under China Central Television. It officially launched on 28 December 2009. CNTV has deployed a multi-terminal business architecture and has built five integrated broadcast-control platforms for internet TV, IPTV, mobile TV, mobile television, and internet television. Through global mirror sites it covers internet users in more than 190 countries and regions, and has launched six foreign-language channels (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, and Korean) and five ethnic-minority-language channels (Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Korean), building a network audiovisual public-service platform with an all-media, full-coverage distribution system.

Customer Requirements

CCTV’s video media-asset library was started in 2008 and has since accumulated more than 600,000 hours of valuable video. Data are scattered across multiple sites, and large amounts of historical data are stored offline on tape, causing slow retrieval, difficulty unlocking historical video assets, low application value of historical data, difficult day-to-day operations, and high operations labor cost.

Tape libraries have a high failure rate, data are easily lost, and backup and restore are very complex.

On the media-production platform, each hour of footage occupies terabytes of disk space. As the ultra-HD era arrives, video file sizes have grown sharply. Storage expansion must keep pace with growth in video file directories.

The media-asset platform stores millions of assets, and hundreds or thousands of users try to search and edit media assets at the same time, placing high demands on peak and constant bitrates.

The media-asset system has copyright requirements. Video sources are purchased from domestic and overseas broadcasters and are extremely valuable, so data reliability must be very high. Ordinary disk arrays cannot meet this need.

Solution

In response to these challenges, Sugon conducted in-depth surveys, understood the customer’s real needs, and configured a ParaStor cluster. The system has 38 data nodes, providing 3 PB of effective massive storage and at least 40 GB/s of high-speed bandwidth. Upper-layer applications mount the cloud storage through NAS, POSIX, RESTful, HDFS, and other protocols, helping CNTV quickly build storage as a service and forming the core storage resource pool of the media-asset management system.

Solution Advantages

1. Simplify complexity and enable unified management

Integrate existing video media-asset data, build a unified video-resource management and storage platform, and complete technical transformation for unified media assets and unified cataloging, so that the application layer can manage media-asset data in a unified way and lay the foundation for fully online operation of CCTV’s video media-asset library.

2. Integrate with media-asset systems for seamless application migration

Testing confirmed that ParaStor is fully compatible with media-asset management systems from professional broadcasting and media software vendors such as Dayang, Xin'aote, Sobey, and Jicheng. It can fully replace original storage products in a media-asset system or be added as new capacity to an existing storage pool. A media-asset storage pool built with Sugon ParaStor is substantially stronger in performance, reliability, scalability, and manageability, easily handling more than 4,000 concurrent reads/writes and multiple access interfaces, with a qualitative improvement in user experience over the original system.

3. Unlock historical data and create new value

ParaStor supports EB-class online expansion and complete multi-tier storage, with intelligent migration of user data among tiers. With ParaStor cloud storage, all user data become “fully online” in the application sense, historical data regain value, and a foundation is laid for multimedia-based big-data mining.

4. Unified management, simple operations

ParaStor distributed cloud storage provides unified web management with fine-grained real-time monitoring of CPU, memory, and other cluster resources, plus automatic alerting. With SNMP and email alerts, equipment-room staff can learn remotely of every storage event. Sugon ParaStor also has self-healing, with no need for manual intervention, greatly lowering operations cost.

5. Reuse existing equipment and maximize customer value

When a new storage system is adopted, how to handle old equipment is a customer concern. Sugon addressed this with a practical reuse plan so that original storage devices (storage servers) can be integrated into the new storage pool and managed by ParaStor, making full use of existing equipment and maximizing customer value.

Customer Benefits

The system is deployed at CNTV and has run online for three years, remaining safe and stable under sustained read/write pressure of more than 10 GB/s. CNTV operations staff praised the storage: “This storage is excellent and fits the need to build a storage resource pool for the media-asset management system.” Capacity is nearly full, and expansion of 22 data nodes is imminent. Sugon will add the latest advanced functions customized for broadcasting and media to provide a better customer experience.