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A Chinese media company established in 2006 specializes in creating online videos that it makes available through TV channels accessed from its online platform. The company provides audiences with diverse content that includes films, TV series, music, cartoons, and other entertainment. The online platform allows users to submit, view, and add commentary that overlays videos.
In 2015, the customer experienced a shift from “Exclusive Broadcast” to “Unique Content.” During this period, the number of users accessing the online platform increased to 60 million. In October 2015, the company collaborated with BBC Worldwide to seek additional opportunities on co-production in the global market.
In 2018, the company launched its international platform and app to attract users worldwide. Since 2019, the company has become one of four online video platforms with the largest market share in Mainland China.
Starting in 2015, the customer’s business grew dramatically. As the number of users increased, so did the number of challenges.
First, the rapid increase in the number of daily video uploads consumed petabytes of storage. To accommodate this surge in content, the company searched for a third-party vendor that could scale capacity to keep pace with the company’s growing storage footprint.
Second, the growing number of users increased the number of back-to-origin requests from users. This rise in requests placed overworked the company’s origin servers, resulting in sluggish performance.
Third, the cache hit ratio at the customer side is slow, forcing content to be served slowly from the original (origin) server instead of rapidly from cache, thereby leading to a poor user experience.
Given these challenges, the company sought a vendor that could offer improved storage efficiencies, achieve a higher cache ratio, and improve user experiences while reducing costs in terms of bandwidth and computation power.
CDNetworks Object Storage delivers reliable, scalable, and available storage service. It’s high performance can easily handle large amounts of data while leveraging globally distributed Points of Presence (PoPs) that offer 500 PB of storage capacity. To address the customer’s issues and satisfy customer requirements, CDNetworks also provides a content delivery network (CDN) along with Object Storage designed to manage massive amounts of audio and video content.
The following figure shows the flow of the CDNetworks solution designed for this customer.
CDNetworks Object Storage connects to the customer origin server and acts as the origin that users access. Object Storage provides a highly scalable, durable, easily managed, and cost-effective mirroring-based storage solution that migrates files from a customer origin server to Object Storage without interruption. During data migration, if a user requests a file that is not present on the Object Storage server, the CDNetworks’ PoP will send the requested file to the customer’s origin server for delivery to the user. After obtaining the file, the CDN PoPs respond to the user directly and save the file for future requests. During this procedure, the mirroring-based storage feature fetches the file from the customer origin and saves it at the Object Storage server where the content is immediately accessible wherever it is needed.
Object Storage also allows customers to upload files for video storage and retrieval. With Object Storage, organizations pay only for the actual storage used, and its size can be scaled instantly, reliably, and almost infinitely.
After Object Storage connects to the customer’s origin server, Object Storage becomes the new external origin. To cope with the ever-increasing volume of data, Object Storage has been built and optimized in a way that reduces the overhead on the customer’s origin while ensuring that no security vulnerabilities are encountered and no malicious objects are uploaded.
Because almost all of the storage files are cached and served from the high-speed CDN without forcing requests back to the origin server, CDNetworks solution with CDN service increases the cache hit ratio, and reduces customer’s bandwidth cost observably. With over 2,800 global PoPs covering numerous ISP partners worldwide, CDNetworks’ robust CDN guarantees that files are delivered closer and faster to users for improved response times, faster downloads, and an unparalleled user experience.
By adopting the CDNetworks Object Storage solution and CDNetworks’ global storage resources, the customer’s end users experienced a quantum leap in their viewing experience. The elastic nature of CDNetworks Object Storage also means that the customer never needs to be concerned about services being stuck or overloaded due to future business growth.
CDNetworks Object Storage integrated CDN solution also helped the customer improve its cache hit ratio — even under heavy concurrent loads — while offloading heavy loads from the customer’s server. As a result, the company’s visitors always see content (cache hit) served by CDN side directly. It helped saving bandwidth and traffic cost for the customer.
This approach also protects the customer’s origin server from compromise by threat actors by exposing the CDNetworks Object Storage server to risk instead of the customer’s origin server.
All things considered, CDNetworks’ seamless storage migration solution guarantees that the customer’s online business can continue to flourish organically, enjoy higher revenue, and deliver content faster and more securely without impairing the user experience or being blocked by stuck spots.