NetApp Storage Case: Guangming

Customer background

"Guangming" is a national comprehensive party newspaper which is hosted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the CPC and is based on the intelligentsia. "Guangming" was founded on June 16, 1949, sponsored by the China Democratic League. Since January 1, 1953, it has been jointly sponsored by the Democratic parties, the Federation and the Independents. After 1957 became the Communist Party of the CPC Central propaganda Department and front directly under the leadership of national newspapers. "Guangming" has been published in the past 60 years, by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin three generations of central leadership group and with Hu Jintao as general secretary of the Central Committee of the concern and attention. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and other central leadership comrades have for "Guangming" founder inscription. Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin have made an inscription for "Guangming", with Hu Jintao as general secretary of the Central Committee of the party to make clear that "guangming" to become a link between the masses of the intelligentsia, into the vast intellectual and popular newspapers.

In the past 60 years, "Guangming" has won the favor of readers both at home and abroad for its distinctive cultural knowledge, profound humanistic connotation, agile authoritative reporting style and elegant and fresh personality grade. "Guangming" adheres to the unique orientation of the intellectuals, constructs the advanced culture to construct the harmonious culture, promotes the outstanding traditional culture as the general topic, the general task, the general goal of the propaganda report, is the contemporary China "The Cultural Diary" and "The Academic Diary".

Not only that, January 1, 1998, "Guangming" electronic version ("Bright Net" predecessor) boarded the Internet (www.gmdaily.com.cn), where the "Guangming" and its affiliated "Beijing News", "Chinese reading Newspaper", "Digest", "Book Pick" magazine, "read" magazine , "Examination" magazine and Guangming publishing house books and other rich digital information. "Guangming" electronic version of the Internet, the ideological, cultural, intellectual, service and readability as the principle of network, to "highlight the cultural taste, service intellectuals" for the purpose. Because of the elegant taste and distinctive features, "guangming" electronic version soon from many Chinese websites stand out, has won wide acclaim at home and abroad netizens.

The challenges facing

The establishment of a simple, easy to manage, with high reliability, high flexibility and high scalability of the storage system to ensure the continuous operation of the business.

"Guangming" is a national and comprehensive party newspaper sponsored by the CPC Central Committee based on intellectual and social orientation. Therefore, the newspaper for the storage system stability and reliability of a very high demand, the most fear is the storage system failure and delay the publication time. However, the old system is direct-attached storage, system performance is low, security is poor. Regular disk failure, resulting in system data loss, business interruption, unable to complete the publishing task as usual.

In addition, since the establishment of the light network, the website has become a study abroad and overseas Chinese to understand the changes in the motherland of the window, but also domestic scholars and many netizens learn to exchange platform. With the content of the website and the rich information, the increase of readers at home and abroad, the website e-mail, news and blog visits increased year by year. Today, the light net visits from Monday to Friday amounted to 60多万次, Saturday, Sunday also has 30多万次. The access and processing of massive amounts of data from newspapers and websites has put a huge strain on the newspaper's storage system. But the old storage system disk capacity is small, and can not realize the expansion of the characteristics of serious constraints on the development of the newspaper and website. Sometimes even have to delete some useful data to ensure a certain amount of storage space, operation and management is very complex.

Creating a simple, manageable, highly reliable, flexible, and scalable storage system is imminent, and Guangming's specific requirements for its storage systems are as follows:

High reliability, security: In the case of hardware failure, data misoperation, power outages and so on, the data needs to be fully protected, can provide a complete data backup and achieve rapid recovery to ensure that the newspaper published on time.

The deployment of new storage systems, so that departments distributed, independent data centralized management, to achieve data sharing, effectively reduce total cost of ownership.

Excellent performance: The entire storage system should provide a high read/write rate, IO operations, very short response time delay, rather than providing a single metric of high performance, thereby improving performance overall.

Scalability: In view of future business development needs, to ensure that the future expansion to expand to more storage capacity support. At the same time can make full use of existing resources to protect investment.

Easy to manage and maintain: Most newspaper IT staff belong to it "generalists". Simplifies operation and maintenance of storage systems for ease of management and saves labor costs.

Solution

Using NetApp Unified Storage Solution

In response to the above requirements of Guangming, NetApp, with its superior technology and leadership in storage, has deployed a unified storage solution for Guangming to help Guangming improve storage reliability, ensure data security, enable flexible scaling, simplify management, and reduce maintenance costs. This is why NetApp solutions stand out from the storage solutions of many well-known providers, and are the main reasons for the Guangming community's favor.

Before deploying a NetApp storage solution, Guangming's editing system was built from two PC servers, and the hard disk storage space for each server was 2*9GB. In addition, there is a server to do data storage, storage capacity for 2*18GB.

In its first collaboration in 2003, NetApp deployed 4 storage-capacity 1TB FAS250 devices for the guangming. At the same time, the snaprestore®, snapmirror®, snapshot™ and other technologies are configured on the NETAPP Unified storage platform. In the following years, Guangming has deployed two sets of FAS250 devices with 2TB storage capacity for its retrieval system, deploying a set of 2TB FAS2020 devices for the database system.

The topology of the deployment system for NETAPP storage systems is compared to the following:

Fig. 1 topology map of Guangming and editing system before deployment

Fig. 2 topology map of the Guangming Society editing system after deployment