business background
As the "killer" value-added services of current radio and television operators, the video on demand and time-shifted replay services carried by the CDN streaming system have important business value for increasing the operator's ARPU value and reducing the loss of existing network users. The quarterly development report of China's cable TV industry in the first quarter of 2020 released by Grant Research shows that my country's cable TV business had 73.097 million video-on-demand users in the first quarter of 2020.
Data challenges faced by operators in the radio and television industry
Expansion capabilities
In order to adapt to the flexible multi-terminal program distribution from large TV screens to small screens such as mobile phones and PADs, in the past, in the storage strategy of CDN push application, the same program source would try to save 4K, HD (high definition), SD (standard definition) and other versions, and now an 8K version will be added. The video data that needs to be stored in the radio and television CDN cache will increase geometrically, requiring storage devices to have strong expansion capabilities.
Throughput
Video on demand is a relatively frequent data exchange process. It is necessary to consider the amount of concurrency carried based on the scale of interactive TV subscribers on the existing network to ensure the call of video resources. Therefore, the storage system needs to have good IO performance and can be used as the business changes. Growth Flexibly scales system performance.
safety
Storage is an important part of the streaming system, involving the preservation and backup of important data. As the core asset of radio and television operators, video data requires high security and high reliability of the storage system.
Massive small files
In order to ensure the smooth distribution of video services, front-end platforms are usually used to slice large files, for example, into small files based on the granularity of KB to MB. With the continuous growth of online content, and the business of 4K/8K ultra-high-definition HDR standards, Gradually added, the massive amounts of small file data that radio and television operators have accumulated in the past will become even larger in the future.
data flow
For some radio and television operators that are expanding to the national market and operating across regions, the distribution of video programs has gone beyond the local area and achieved a nationwide centralized layout. They have begun to use the economic and flexible public cloud in addition to their self-built data centers. CDN resources for flexible content distribution to reduce operating expenses. This requires the storage system to support the deployment of local data centers and multiple public clouds to achieve data flow across different geographical locations.
Advantages of radio and television CDN streaming solutions
Linear expansion of capacity and performance
It has the typical characteristics of linear expansion of capacity and performance of traditional object storage, high reliability and high availability, and multi-tenant management. With the development of video-on-demand services, storage resources can be expanded on demand without having to do it all in one step, saving current unnecessary equipment investment.
High data security and high availability
Supports multi-level data protection such as EC erasure coding, copy, fault domain, cross-site replication, encryption, and WORM. Data durability is as high as 99.999999999%, and system availability is above 99.9%. It ensures that the core video business assets of radio and television operators are high. Secure access and storage simultaneously ensure the continuous operation of radio and television services, reduce the risk of downtime due to physical or logical failures, and provide business recovery capabilities with RTO and RPO close to 0.
Memory read and write performance optimization
Industry-leading small file (less than 1MB) memory online merging and read-write optimization. Compared with the traditional SSD-based offline merging technology, the writing performance is improved by 50%. At the same time, through intelligent small file merging, the overall system is also greatly improved. Space utilization, solving the problem of massive small file management for radio and television operators.
Powerful performance
Self-developed metadata service engine and distributed storage engine solve the important shortcomings of traditional object storage products such as limited number of objects in a single bucket, limited size of a single cluster, insufficient small file processing capabilities, difficulty in cross-site data synchronization and management, and high consumption of system resources. , provides strong system performance for streaming services, and is compatible with the next generation metadata management platform, enabling seamless upgrades in the future.
Flexible deployment
This product and solution can be deployed in local data centers, as well as in multiple public clouds and edge locations. It truly transcends the limitations of geographical location and platform, builds a global unified namespace, and realizes the unified integration of unstructured data storage resources. Based on this feature, radio and television operators who are beginning to "go global" can easily combine the advantages of the public cloud to achieve rapid content distribution across the country and even overseas with economic investment.
Support service component subscriptions
This product and solution supports the addition of various service components through subscription, enabling iterative evolution from a single object storage system in a single data center to a block storage system, big data storage system, container storage system, NAS file system, and data lake. Platform, data management platform, data service platform and even a complete hybrid multi-cloud data platform spanning data center, multi-cloud and edge, providing opportunities for radio and television operators to develop from a single video service provider to integrating voice, data, video, broadband and multimedia in the future A full-service operator of the business, laying the technical foundation.
