KADOKAWA Connected

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 and 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.

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.  

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.