The ivi online movie theater reduced video content storage expenses using solutions of Western Digital

About the Customer

ivi \ the online movie theater, largest in Russia, with audience more than 48 million unique visitors a month who spend 70 million hours on the platform. The huge collection of video content — domestic and foreign movies, animated films and series is presented in the ivi directory. In total on servers of the company more than 62 thousand names of video are stored.

Prerequisites

For storage of content, and it is more than 62 thousand names of video, ivi used 80 All-in-One servers ("all in one") with 8/12 hard drives with a capacity of 4-6 TB. In need of increase in storage new servers were bought. This equipment including was used both for archive, and for low-demanded files which seldom get on high-speed productive servers for caching of a streaming video.

The number of units of content, and, respectively, the place taken by it constantly increased that required the increasing and large volumes of disk space and maintenance costs of all this infrastructure.

Tasks

The task most effectively to increase data storage density in storage and to increase the number of carriers in terms of 1 item of equipment was set for IT specialists of ivi. Preserving of complete operability of the existing pool of servers when adding new drives and shelves was the mandatory requirement.

Solution

The Western Digital company undertook the solution of an assigned task. She suggested to use the disk regiments Ultrastar Data60 filled the 60th tough with the disks Ultrastar HC510.

Western Digital Ultrastar Data60

Specialists of Western Digital used the approach assuming separation of servers and data. Thanks to disk regiments drives were taken out "for a framework" servers. It allowed to reduce their quantity, to unify a storage system and also to reduce quantity of points of management and to reduce costs of the company in terms of 1 TB.

For caching of popular materials solid state drives were in addition installed that allowed to increase the overall performance of a system.

The option offered Western Digital was more effective, than the scheme of data storage used earlier or, for example, lease of disk space in commercial network storage. In the latter case would be insufficiently provided communication channel for data transmission and processing of constantly growing quantity of flows.

Results of Implementation

In a project deliverable instead of usual servers ivi had sets including in addition to servers special disk regiments. Such solution allowed to store more information in terms of 1 unit of space and also increased the speed of its reading. At the same time operating systems and the software for work with data practically did not demand completion that also promoted expense reduction of the company.

Thanks to disk shelves with drives with a capacity of 10 TB (instead of 6 TB in servers) not 15, but from 50 to 60 TB of content is the share of 1 unit any more, i.e. data storage requires 4 times less place. Thus the number of servers, necessary for work, and quantity of the purchased items of equipment for new video records was succeeded to reduce the companies that considerably reduced costs on maintenance of infrastructure and storage of content. In general as a result of implementation of disk shelves these items of expenditure managed to be lowered approximately three times. This method completely answered with requirements of the customer therefore alternative vendors were not considered further.

According to the head of operation of ivi Valentin Frosin, optimization of storage system was necessary to the company for further development. The solution of Western Digital for 100% met all requirements of the company and allowed to offer the audience more rare content, he noted.

Development plans

In future ivi expects continuation of cooperation with Western Digital. In particular, in process of expansion of the directory of video content acquisition of new disk shelves with hard drives of bigger capacity is planned.