About the project

Jointly established by TEVEL, ZAHAV and MATAV in 2003, HOT Communications specializes in providing various innovative products and services including TV channels, Internet infrastructure and direct telephone lines. Currently, the company serves totally 9 million users, including 7 million Internet service subscribers. Moreover, it provides Internet access for 40% of the Israeli netizen and operates over 500,000 telephone lines. Because of the well-developed optical fiber cable TV network infrastructure deployed throughout Israel with a total length of 6,500km, HOT Communications provides users with over 150 digital TV watching channels, including TV drama serial, movie and sports channels, channels for children, selected program, entertainment channels, music, culture, science, foreign language and international news channels, as well as about 10 closed-circuit HD channels. In addition, HOT Communications is a leading TV content provider, investing about NIS7 million each year in providing its users with TV drama serials, which have been given many awards.

Application performance 

1. Based on an integrated CDN structure, the VOD system comprises a national headend and 3 regional headends. Two UML&BWFS cluster file systems are configured to the national headend to form the core content database; one UML&BWFS cluster file system is configured to each regional headend as a CDN cache gateway to connect the national headend with edge streamers.

2. The BWFS cluster file system realizes centralized storage and shared access at the national and regional headends and integrates all the disks arrays into a unified space. A catalog is created so that clients can use the storage space as their local hard disks and share files. The solution integrates SAN's scalability and high performance with NAS's usability and realizes the centralized storage.
 
 3. Edge streamer servers will provide VOD flows as required by set-top boxes and obtain the required content from gateways with high-speed cache; the BWFS realizes high-performance access of the gateways with high-speed cache and employs the out-of-band structure to separate metadata from data. Given the strong IO performance, all clients can access the data stored in the disk arrays directly, giving full play to the bandwidth and performance of the SAN environment.

4. The system distributes data between the content database and cache gateway according to the strategy to balance network utility, storage space utility and service responding speed. The system can provide 1.8 million VOD flows each day. The BWFS provides a storage system that can be expanded, managed and maintained conveniently. Because of the full optical fiber structure of the storage system, users can add basic storage devices including disks, expansion cabinets and controllers without interrupting services. New storage space can be directly added into the file system, realizing the online capacity expansion without interrupting continuity of services. The system provides unified MDC management and a Web-based management interface that supports multiple languages including English and Chinese. The intelligent system fault diagnosis and performance analysis module can detect and analyze system and network failures. Therefore, system administrators can timely discover and solve problems, reducing the fault rate and improving the working efficiency of system administrators.

What's more, HOT Communications provides the latest VOD service, which has largely evolved the TV program watching mode.

1. VOD: HOT Communications provides the world's largest program database for its users, including 10,000 hours of TV drama serials, movies, performances and videos. More than half of its users use the VOD service frequently.

2. Time-Shifted TV: HOT Communications enables users to control the TV broadcasting schedule and to record dozens of hours' programs.

3. Interactive games: HOT Communications has developed and provided various interactive TV games for users of all ages.

Solution 

The solution provides a BWStor CSA cluster file system. It comprises the SeeChange broadcasting system and BlueWhale storage products. The UML&BWFS BlueWhale file system forms 5 central storage systems, of which 2 are configured to the national headends and 3 to the 3 regional headends.

The BWStor CSA cluster system is aimed to enhance the performance and reliability of the broadcasting system.