Zhejiang Daily Press Group Optimizes the User Experience with Hitachi Content Platform

Overview

Challenge

• Improve performance, data lifecycle management and protection for the group’s award-winning media platform.

Solution

• Hitachi Content Platform provides scalable storage and easier data protection and management.

Outcome

• Faster file search and retrieval for a better user experience.
• Automated archiving for easier management.
• Greater data protection to reduce risk.
• Scalability to cope with data growth.

Challenge

Improving Performance for an Award-Winning Media Platform

Established in 1949, Zhejiang Daily Press Group is one of the top five newspaper groups in China, and the largest in Zhejiang Province. With 26 newspapers and magazines, it has 640 million registered web users, 40 million active users and 20 million mobile users. The group was twice included in the World Brand Lab’s World Media Top 500 ranking.

With readers increasingly discerning about the timeliness and quality of their news, the group launched its Media Cube platform.

The intelligent broadcast platform includes functions for public opinion collection, centralized news operations, multi-channel distribution and tracking news performance metrics. Independently developed by the group,the platform has won multiple accolades, including the China News Science and Technology Award and the Grand Prize of the Wang Xuan Award.

Media Cube has massive amounts of unstructured data, including images and videos. The platform creates approximately two million new objects a day, projected to reach eight hundred million in a year. With a conservative forecast of 30% annual growth, the number of new objects would reach three billion within three years.

With growing data volumes and an outdated network-attached storage solution, the Media Cube user experience was deteriorating as the storage system was unable to cope with the constant need to write, search and delete large volumes of data.

The group also faced data management challenges, as its existing file system, based on FastDFS, struggled to manage data lifecycles and to archive data. With very basic data protection, Zhejiang Daily Press Group was exposed to a high risk of data loss. Plus, with such large volumes of data, the group’s backup system resulted in spiraling storage requirements and costs.

Zhejiang Daily Press Group needed a more suitable storage solution that would connect with its business systems, support the growth of its data, and safeguard security as the group expanded its user base.

Solution

Boosting Performance and Scalability with Hitachi Content Platform

To simplify data management, Zhejiang Daily Press Group implemented Hitachi Content Platform. The distributed object storage system supports the Media Cube’s large-scale unstructured database.

Hitachi Content Platform enables rapid retrieval of massive amounts of data, with support for up to 1,000 petabytes of storage capacity. This means that there was no need to set up disjointed storage systems and create multiple file systems in order to fulfil the group’s data storage needs. By using flash acceleration at access and storage points, Zhejiang Daily Press Group has been able to optimize performance and address the Media Cube challenges.

With the solution, the group has also been able to enhance data protection. Hitachi Content Platform eliminates the need to rely on time-consuming traditional backups and improves data persistence, protecting and repairing physical errors, logic errors caused by human error or viruses, bit errors and disaster scenarios.

Using Hitachi Content Platform, Zhejiang Daily Press Group has created a data lake that can be searched at any time. With access points and integration with big data, users can carry out complex big data analysis direct on the static data.

Outcome

An Optimized Experience for Media Cube Users

Zhejiang Daily Press Group has already migrated 2.1 billion objects to Hitachi Content Platform. It is also continuously migrating data from its original network-attached storage to the new object storage platform. In addition to the files being migrated from the network-attached storage, the platform is generating two million new objects a day. Within a year, it is estimated that the platform will include an additional 800 million new objects. With a conservative growth estimate of 30% per year, there will be more than three billion new objects added within three years.

With the ability to expand storage seamlessly, Hitachi Content Platform provides the support for the enormous amounts of data involved. The solution also enables:

Speedy file retrieval: Access and storage nodes use flash storage, which enables faster database searches and faster metadata searches as well as faster file access. This meets the group’s current performance requirements and will support seamless expansion and future needs.

Automatic, effective online archiving: Hitachi Content Platform’s backend storage space is managed across distributed nodes on local disks. It can be connected externally to high-density, high-volume object storage nodes, network file system (NFS) storage, heterogeneous magnetic tape libraries, disk towers or even public cloud storage systems. As well as setting aside one petabyte specially for an object storage node, Zhejiang Daily Press Group also uses its original FastDFS storage space. This enables reuse of existing equipment and direct storage of active data in containers, while automatically archiving inactive historical records.

Better protection for Media Cube files: With write-once-read-many (WORM) functionality, automatic double-writing of video files and autosave functions, the files written onto Hitachi Content Platform are safe from accidental deletions and logic errors which can corrupt video files. The solution also has patented erasure coding that allows for zero data loss for up to six damaged drives, preventing the loss of data stemming from physical damage. With Hitachi Content Platform’s disaster protection capabilities, Media Cube data is safe without the need for backups.

Yu Hongwei, Information Security and Operations Center Director, Zhejiang Daily Press Group, comments, “With Hitachi Content Platform, we have been able to achieve high-speed data access, automatic and efficient archiving and backup-free data protection. As a result, we’re better able to meet demand from our users for instant access to rich and diverse content.”