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The customer is one of the world’s top game entertainment companies, with nearly 30 years of history and many well-known games that bear its name.
Although the customer has data storage repositories located in various locations around the world, it has yet to establish one in China. To optimize the downloading experience for gamers residing in China, the customer leverages CDNs to accelerate game downloading services within the country. However, this acceleration generates back-to-origin requests from Chinese gamers to overseas storage, which incurs huge cross-border egress traffic costs and compromises back-to-origin speed and game downloading quality.
To address these issues, the client required a stable storage service to house game packages and distribute them efficiently to gamers located in China. This case study describes how the CDNetworks’ team helped the customer address these issues and quickly set up game storage in China.
The customer faced several challenges when migrating its game packages from its current storage repository to one located in China.
Large Migration Workload
The migration involved millions of files and several PBs of data. The customer had to complete the migration within two months to meet its Christmas promotion deadline while allowing sufficient time for testing.
Poor Cross-border Network Connection
Migrating from an overseas repository to one located in China involved dealing with crossing border networks and the China Firewall, both of which placed a successful migration at risk. The customer’s game packages are around 4GB in size, which makes them extremely sensitive to network interruptions and data transmission efficiencies.
Moreover, data egress fees must be paid to the original storage to transfer files from the original storage repository to the new one. However, an unstable network between China and overseas often led to connection interruptions during data transfers, forcing the customer to restart the process and experience increased data egress fees.
Slow Uploads
The customer uploads files from the US to various storage services located across different regions every day. These uploads must be completed within two hours to maintain consistency of game versions across storage repositories. However, uploading files from overseas locations to repositories in China within the required time constraints proved to be a challenging task.
Impact to Online Business
The customer’s online platform receives millions of game download requests from end-users. To ensure minimal impact to its online business and origin servers, the data migration had to be performed with exceptional care to avoid impacting business operations.
To address the issues mentioned above, CDNetworks provided a comprehensive solution that fulfilled the customer’s requirements. The solution included the following key features.
Comprehensive Migration Service
CDNetworks provided a completely free data migration service and assigned a dedicated migration implementation team to work with the customer. The customer provided only read-only access to its AWS S3 Storage. CDNetworks helped the customer migrate files in batches and repeatedly compared file consistencies, completing full-volume PB-level file migration within 6 weeks. CDNetworks also provided the following additional services to ensure a successful migration:
Dedicated Cross-border Line
To ensure the stability of the migration, CDNetworks leveraged its CDN resource advantage and built a dedicated data channel from China to the USA, solving the network stability problem and ensuring migration success. In just a month and a half, CDNetworks completed the full-volume PB-level file migration, providing the customer ample time to test and prepare for its upcoming Christmas promotion. The customer was extremely satisfied with the migration, which went smoothly without any issues.
Upload Acceleration
CDNetworks utilized High-Speed Data Transmission (HDT) to address slow upload issues. HDT accelerated TCP and UDP data transfers across regions and established a high-speed data tunnel between the USA and China, along with an optimized Data Transfer Protocol (DTP). These technologies increased upload speeds significantly, with a single-line upload increasing from a sluggish 2Mbps to a blistering 150Mbps, which is 75 times faster. In multi-concurrent situations, the speed could reach 600Mbps.
Mirroring Storage Technology and Full Compatibility with S3
CDNetworks set up mirrored storage, for example AWS S3, as a backup origin to replicate data for the customer. With this in place, if a game package requested by an end-user could not be found in Object Storage on the CDNetworks platform, the CDN fetched it from AWS S3 directly and responded to the end user promptly. At the same time, the Object Storage stored the file as a copy for future use.
All of this was done within a second, making it seamless and imperceptible to end-users. It also provided peace of mind to the customer, who no longer had to be concerned about missing files following the migration.
CDNetworks’ Object Storage also provided a fully compatible S3 API interface, which fully adapted to the customer’s existing storage business. This approach eliminated the need for any new development. All in all, these services ensured a seamless migration, without impacting the customer’s online business.
By using CDNetworks’ solution, the customer achieved the following real-world benefits: