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CRYSTAL CG Post-Production Network Storage Project

Release Date:2012-01-17

About the project

Founded in 1995, CRYSTAL CG has emerged as a leading digital visual solution provider in Asia with over 2,200 employees and more than 10 domestic and overseas branches. As a global leading digital visual technology and service provider, CRYSTAL CG has been committed to providing world-class digital visual services with its digital 3D technology.


CRYSTAL CG is able to provide a full range of digital media products and services that comply with international criteria and cover designing, planning and production, helping customers fulfill their objectives. The FuWa and Olympics is an animation serial centered the Beijing Olympics. It was sponsored by Beijing Publicity Department with an investment of 50 million RMB and jointly produced by BTV, Beijing Kaku TV and CRYSTAL CG. The production of the animation serial posed great challenges for the performance and capacity of the digital media production network's storage system.


In a media post-production network, video materials include HD and SD videos. Numerous video materials must be shared and edited by several clients concurrently, posing a strict requirement for the storage network's performance. However, the traditional NAS solution is unable to provide high performance and speed for 50 clients. Moreover, in large projects, large storage space is required and enormous materials must be processed within a short period. Therefore, users must carefully select storage strategies, especially when the post-production requires massive file rendering.


Solution 

To meet these requirements, the storage system of CRYSTAL CG post-production network is designed based on the optical fiber network. The post-production network comprises a BWStor BW3200, a BWStor BW2000 and 3 BlueWhale dual-controller FC disk arrays, 2 Dawning 1620R-FC NAS servers, 140 Dell 755 servers and several Dawning 5000A servers. The core network and sub-network are built with H3C and Cisco switches.


BWStor BW3200 integrates the 3 BlueWhale dual-controller FC disk arrays into a unified space to provide file sharing and storage services. The 2 NAS servers can switch the network of the file sharing and storage space from FC network to Ethernet. Therefore, clients can share and store files through Ethernet. Given that back-end client devices adopt optical fiber disk arrays, clients do not need to install the HBA card and optical fiber network. BWStor BW2000 can configure the strategy according to project needs, such as RAID types, sharing scope and storage strategy of the file system. After a project is completed, the RAID type is configured to meet requirements of the next project, thus realizing fast configuration. 

 

  
 
Application performance
  
BWStor BW3200 and BWStor BW2000 that center the BWStor CSA have been proven reliable through strict testing and practical use with the following features:
1. Based on the BWFS file system, it supports file sharing and access in SAN mode, enabling users to share files without copying them from one client to another and to edit files concurrently, thus saving a lot of time for users.


2. Because of the quick responding speed and data access performance, the two systems allow multiple clients to access data concurrently.


3. The products can provide large, unified and expandable storage space. The increase of disk arrays will substantially enhance the storage bandwidth of the entire storage system.


4. BWStor BW2000 can adjust its storage strategy according to the project need and meet significant projects' requirements on storage performance and safety. Therefore, it can independently undertake the video post-production of large projects.


5. BWStor BW3200 adopts the dual-device redundancy design, while BWStor BW2000 applies the dual-controller structure. The FC array of BWStor BW3200DS employs multiple RAID technologies. These technologies and the hierarchy redundancy structure will ensure security of data.