FS Distributed Storage Network Solution Helps Media Industry Business Transformation

"FS assisted us in upgrading our storage and network, resulting in a cost reduction while doubling the performance!"

——Maximilian Krause (Technical Director)

Background

The media, broadcast, and entertainment industries, at the forefront of technological advancement, place high demands on the capacity and reliability of infrastructure networks. A European broadcasting company primarily engaged in broadcast distribution and remote production. Due to the limited performance of storage devices and the high price of FC devices, the customer expected to upgrade the original centralized storage to distributed storage and realize network upgrades at the same time. The storage network transformation solution provided by FS not only helped users with the best experience but also reduced operating costs and improved network reliability.

Challenge

• With the gradual expansion of the business scale of enterprises, the capacity of storage devices was obviously insufficient at present. During peak data processing times, video uploads were slow and sometimes even frozen.

• The customer needed a highly reliable and stable network connection. The failure or restart of the network switch prevents all users from uploading videos to the server, which adversely affects the customer's business and reputation.

• The lack of scalability and speed of existing FC switches prompted the customer to urgently need an efficient solution to deal with high concurrent access during business peaks.

Solution

Building a Solid Storage Foundation: Optimizing Architecture for Future Expansion

Based on the growth of customer business data, the current SAN storage device was close to its maximum capacity. Device performance bottlenecks lead to video upload freezes or upload failures, resulting in slow data backup synchronization and affecting customer business operations. After consulting with our customer, the FS technical team concluded that expanding the storage device was not only costly but also impractical.

Unlike centralized storage, distributed storage offers high performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. We proposed to replace the customer's original centralized storage architecture with a distributed storage architecture. This approach allowed for easy expansion to meet storage space and performance requirements by adding servers and hard drives. Additionally, by moving to distributed storage, we were able to reduce the price of a 1TB storage device by 75%. After the solution was implemented, we followed up with the customer for a month to verify that the problems of slow video upload and data backup were resolved.

Dual Redundancy Network and Storage: Ensuring Optimal Data Security

The customer had previously experienced severe outages that prevented users from uploading videos for long periods, which made them very concerned about network stability. To address their concerns, FS planned to create a synchronized network and storage solution that included redundancy protection. Specifically, we deployed the N8560-48BC switch as a stack at the network level. Each switch in the stack was connected to the storage device's service ports using multiple links. This setup achieved double copy protection for general data and triple copy protection for critical core data, thereby creating an additional layer of redundancy. Even if a switch or two servers goes down, normal operations can continue as long as another device is functional, ensuring that data is safe and business can continue uninterrupted.

Enhancing Efficiency and Reducing Costs with High-Density Ethernet Switches

The customer originally wanted to use expensive 8G FC switches for storage expansion, and the overall cost would be high. As a more cost-effective alternative, FS technical team recommended the N8560-48BC Ethernet switch in distributed storage scenarios that required a full device replacement. This solution significantly reduced video upload time by a third. To one's surprise, this solution cost only one-fifth of the original 8G FC switch scaling approach.

Conclusion

By upgrading the centralized storage network to a distributed storage network, the customer's storage transmission performance and efficiency have been greatly improved. In addition, the solutions proposed by the FS technical team also helped customers reduce expansion costs and realize efficient and cost-effective storage networks.