Kadokawa Connected

Scality offers highly performant, stable, and scalable storage system for livestream for one of Japan’s leading video-sharing platforms.

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CUSTOMERS / MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT

Kadokawa Connected

Scality enables seamless data streaming for a leading video-sharing platform in Japan

Scality RING keeps content available to users, offering high stability and scalability at a low cost

KADOKAWA Connected Inc., an IT strategy subsidiary of Japanese media conglomerate KADOKAWA Group, is a group of engineers who are on a mission to achieve digital transformation

KADOKAWA also aims to reduce costs associated with the design, operation and management of the group’s information systems and service infrastructure.

Their sights were set on deploying a highly performant, stable and scalable storage system for live-stream data from niconico Live, one of Japan’s largest video-sharing platforms.

The challenge

Because video streaming is the core function of niconico Live, in terms of fault tolerance, KADOKAWA Connected thought it risky to depend on a single storage system. That’s why they were using vendor’s appliances and IA server-based SDS in dual configuration for redundancy.

The vendor’s appliances system needed to be replaced for several reasons: It wasn’t a scale-out type, it had instances of low performance with increased storage capacity, and it required a significant number of labor hours to be spent at the time of failure so operational costs remained high.

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“By going with Scality RING, we managed to build a storage system with high stability and scalability at a low cost.”

Toshiya Kato

Head of KCS Server & DataStore division, KADOKAWA Connected

The outcome

KADOKAWA Connected had three main requirements for their new storage system: stable performance, high availability and scalability, as well as lower total cost of ownership — and Scality RING has delivered.

With more people at home due to the government declaring a state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic, requests for time-shifted video feeds during peak hours reached levels 6 to 7 times higher than normal. Scality RING alone was sufficient to cope with the increased demand for streaming.

Support provided by Scality’s Japan-based staff, in Japanese and local time, as well as Scality RING’s seamless integration into KADOKAWA Connected’s monitoring system proved to be great advantages. Deploying Scality RING slashed the man-hours spent on operation and maintenance, essentially saving the cost and effort of one full-time employee.

Scality RING will continue to play an increasingly important role as a foundation supporting KADOKAWA Group’s growth. They’re looking into expanding into additional use cases.

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“Scality RING allows us to install monitoring agents in the nodes, providing flexibility for logging into monitoring tools, metrics capture, system monitoring by SNMP and more. For operational efficiency, this is a significant advantage.”

Takumi Tsujishita

KCS Server & DataStore division, KADOKAWA Connected

Low TCO

KADOKAWA Connected is enjoying dramatic savings — a reduction of effort and cost equivalent to one full-time employee.

Smooth, stable performance

Scality RING alone proved sufficient enough to cope with demand for time-shifted video feeds 6 to 7 times above normal.

High-touch local support

Support provided by Japanese staff, in Japanese and local time, helped make the deployment seamless.

RING Hybrid Cloud Data Management

The combination of on-premises storage and the public cloud enables hybrid cloud use cases that are changing the way enterprise IT leaders think about data management and data protection.

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