YNTV, owning 9 radio channels and 13 categories of radio programs, 10 TV channels including Satellite Channel (YNTV-1) which reaches an audience of 700 million, two websites, one radio museum, and Yunnan Communication Group. YNTV is a modern comprehensive media group with business areas spanning radio, TV, newspaper and Internet.
Broadcasting
Under the transformation of converged media, YNTV is introducing a series of new businesses and initiatives with the demand of an upgrade of the outdated IT infrastructure.
In recent years, different types of media including print, broadcast and online media are giving people more options of leisure and intellectual activities than ever, but with the rapid development of the mobile Internet, traditional media operators are now confronted with the question of how to develop and transform their business. In order to better cope with the challenges, YNTV, after serious consideration of the future trend of converged media, has been an active innovator in grasping the trend of development in radio and TV technologies and transforming its business. Now, YNTV has achieved significantly in integrating radio, TV, newspaper and Internet.
Business changes and adjustments require the effective support from the IT infrastructure. According to the infrastructure architect of YNTV’s IT department, the original IT architecture of YNTV was very traditional. Its broadcasting division, for example, had a datacenter with 40 servers clustered together, each serving one category of applications, with a low level in energy consumption performance and server applications per se. Virtualization, which was introduced only in recent years, was just tried on a small scale on noncore systems such as OA system, news gathering and editing system. When setting about introducing a series of new businesses and initiatives, YNTV found that the architecture of its existing IT infrastructure had become a bottleneck for its converged media driven development. In response, YNTV decided to overhaul and upgrade its IT infrastructure. So YNTV has investigated many integrators to understand their major IT construction solutions and finally determined to build a new datacenter accordance with the converged media development.
After much deliberation, YNTV finally decided to build its own enterprise cloud datacenter after three years of business convergence of its TV and radio divisions in 2013 to overcome the bottlenecks brought by outdated IT infrastructure. “Unlike many other enterprises, regarding the construction of data center, what matters most to YNTV is not cost, but rather security, reliability, and continuity. The punctuality of program broadcasting is the upmost priority.” the infrastructure architect of YNTV said. In fact, Hyperconvergence was not considered when they began their assessment. It was after a comprehensive comparison of multiple alternative solutions that YNTV began, at the end of 2015, considering hyperconvergence before eventually choosing the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.
YNTV first tested a demo unit provided by Nutanix in Kunming and then went to the test center of Nutanix located in Shanghai for on-the-spot investigation and detailed product consultation. Testing found that Nutanix’s delivery of software-defined storage and distributed storage is the simplest, with computing and storage integrated to deliver superior performance. The simplified logical architecture of Nutanix’s solution was an important factor of the solution being eventually adopted by YNTV.
Another main reason of choosing the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform is that it can substantially reduce the complexity of management. Nutanix can provide a total virtualization platform solution including high-availability design of storage, data security, and platform management to streamline management and eliminate IT bottlenecks that hinders business growth. Through integrating multiple analytical technologies, Nutanix enterprise cloud platform can establish an ideal technical platform for media convergence with its hyperconvergence, virtualization of VMware, NFV, storage, internet virtualization and computing virtualization. Such a platform can consistently provide favorable services for converged media in the next 3 to 5 years.
With such consideration, YNTV finally decided to adopt Nutanix’s enterprise cloud platform as an upgrade of its IT infrastructure.
For the current near 10 million RMB deployment, YNTV has adopted 10 NX-1065-G4 nodes in a cluster dedicated to production and broadcasting and 29 NX-3060-G4 nodes in a cluster dedicated to the general business network to meet its business needs in the coming three to five years. So far, the hyperconvergence system adopted by YNTV is the largest in scale in China broadcasting industry and the pioneer in the innovation of infrastructure.
Currently, the systems running on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform include OA system, production and broadcasting system, converged media business, news gathering and editing, and media resources system, involving the entire process from news gathering to distribution, with almost all business units being incorporated. Noteworthily, the deployment work encountered absolutely no problem at all.
The Nutanix system’s high efficiency and high availability is especially impressive to YNTV. During the deployment, an error in an important initial setting required a reinstallation of system, which was expected to take four or five days but was actually completed in just two days. To verify the high availability, a disk was removed by force, and it was quickly repaired with no loss of data.
Besides a high-reliability and high-efficiency system architecture, hyperconvergence delivers a lot of savings in time, labor and space. According to YNTV’s statistics, after the deployment, the space efficiency of its IT equipment has improved by 50%-60%, in addition to a varying degree of savings in power consumption and manpower, with its overall IT expenses decreasing by approximately 30%-40%. Most importantly, the private cloud platform prevents the scenario of a computing-intensive business leading to the shortage of computing resources and eliminates the need to add separate resources for new services.
The private cloud component of YNTV’s datacenter took nearly RMB 10 million. With the exception of few special hardware systems, almost all business systems are migrated to the private cloud system. According to the architect, “We are actually the first media who run the broadcasting system on the hyperconverged architecture among the industry all over the country. We also want to thank Yunnan Wiki Technology Co., LTD. As the major local partner of Nutanix, they provided a top-ranking IT team and showcased their professional capability. ”
YNTV actively implemented the transformation from traditional IT infrastructure to hyperconvergence. The private cloud platform based on Nutanix’s enterprise cloud hyperconverged architecture with extensive advantages and unique features has allowed YNTV to complete its IT infrastructure upgrade and optimization quickly and improve its competitiveness. This provides an excellent case worthy of drawing upon and learning from by many enterprises in current informatization trends.
After the deployment, the space efficiency of its IT equipment has improved by 50%-60%, in addition to a varying degree of savings in power consumption and manpower, with its overall IT expenses decreasing by approximately 30%-40%.