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Beijing
Planetarium
Beijing Planetarium Implements
a SAN to Harness a New Universe
of Data
Organization
Beijing Planetarium
C A S E S T U D Y
The SANbox 5000 series switches are the only stackable Fibre Channel switches in
the industry today, providing high bandwidth and unmatched scalability for future
super high bandwidth upgrade requirement. This scalability is achieved with 10Gbps
Inter-switch links (ISLs) that connect switches together at blazing fast speeds, without
sacrificing valuable user ports.
Introduction to China’s Beijing Planetarium
The Beijing Planetarium contains three main parts: the old facility of Beijing Planetarium,
the new facility of Beijing Planetarium, and Beijing ancient observatory. With a
construction area of 7,000 square meters, the old facility was first built in 1955 and
opened to public in 1957. It consists of a planetarium, an exhibition hall, a movie lecture
hall, and a public observatory.
The new facility of Beijing Planetarium, which adjoins the existing old facility building,
began to be built in 2001 and was intended to be completed in the fourth quarter of
2004, with a construction area of 20,000 square meters. The new facility is made up
of several exciting parts, including: a digital universe, a theater, 3D theater, 4D theater,
exhibition hall, solar observatory, public observatory, and an astronomy classroom.
Industry
Video Production
Location
Beijing, China
Applications
Xsan
Solution Set
Planetarium Digital Video Programs Editing System, in
conjunction with a Fibre Channel SA N
Products Used
Redundant RAID storage, Xsan from Apple, dual Mac G5s,
and two (2) QLogic SA Nbox(R) 5202 stackable Fibre Channel
Switches
Hand in hand with the new facility comes the digital content and High Definition (HD)
video driving its many attractions, resulting in a new universe of data. This data is
generated by the new Planetarium Digital Video Programs Editing System (PDVPES ),
which carries thousands of digital video clips that require being viewed, edited, reviewed
and broadcast anytime, day in and day out.
The business challenges that led to the installation of a SA N to manage this galaxy
of data are outlined below. These challenges quickly became apparent to Beijing
Planetarium during the implementation of the PDVPES solution.
Requirements and challenges of building the new PDVPES
1. Advanced hardware: The PDVPES processes a large amount of HD video, animation
and audio for the 3D and 4D planetary programs to be played everyday. It requires the
best high-performance hardware on the market to ensure optimum efficiency and
productivity for the Beijing Planetarium. To achieve this efficiency and productivity,
it was necessary to deploy servers with 64-bit processors, include the existing
Ethernet network, add a redundant RAID system, and add a Fibre Channel storage
area network including 2Gb and 10Gb ISL link speeds to make the solution viable.
2. Ease of use: The user and management interface in any aspect of the solution must
be easy to learn and easy to use. This would significantly improve the efficiency of
all personnel who would use the system to edit, broadcast, and maintain the digital
videos, as well as manage the infrastructure
The Core of PDVPES
PDVPES consists of seven major sectors. 1. Animation Editing System, 2. Sound and music
Editing System; 3. Rendering Cluster; 4. Post Production System; 5. Video Projection System;
6. Online and offline Storage System; 7. High Speed Communication Network. The core of the
PDVPES is the high-speed communications network running the Fibre Channel SA N provided
by QLogic, as well as Xsan technology from Apple. With dual Apple Xserve G5s as the MDC
server cluster, all the sectors in the PDVPES will be able to share very large amounts of data
from the Storage System at very high rates of speed.
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Beijing Planetarium
C AS E S T U DY
3. Reliability: The Planetarium opens to the general public all year round.
The Planetarium’s video system has to be available everyday to fulfill the
requirement of all planetarium visitors in China. A key requirement was
implementing a highly available architecture with full redundancy for
long-term stability and continuous up-time, to ensure non-stop operation
of the system.
4. Open technology: The system must be employing the latest open
communications technology to allow integration of products from different
manufacturers. It should also cater to scaling the SAN with future products.
For example, Fibre Channel, TCP/IP, Firewire 800 & Firewire 400, USB2.0
in communication standards and SMB, AFP, NFS & XSAN from Apple.
5. Cost effectiveness: The price/performance of all the hardware and software
to be deployed must meet the tight budget of PDVPES.
6. Scalability: The PDVPES is divided in to three phases of deployment. Each
phase of the architecture must allow a very flexible and seamless upgrade
to the next phase. Therefore, the system architecture, connectivity of
products, processing power, storage capacity, SAN and network bandwidth
must be upgradeable and scalable to fulfill the increasing demand from
Planetarium users.
7. Serviceability and Management: To cope with the fully automated
management system in the Planetarium, all the hardware and software
components must provide an interface to be monitored by a central
management station. The operation status and fault alarms have to be
reported automatically. Furthermore, Graphical User Interface is required
for each component to be managed.
The Solution with Qlogic
In the core of the PDVPES , QLogic SA Nbox® 5000 series Fibre Channel
switches are being deployed in the solution because they meet all of the most
demanding requirements of the Beijing Planetarium production environment.
All the video data transfer, manipulation and data management must be fast
and effective to allow the staff to perform their jobs quickly and easily.
During the first phase of the deployment, Beijing Planetarium required
approximately 30 Fibre Channel ports for host and device connectivity. The SA
Nbox 5000 price point and scalability fits the needs of the Planetarium perfectly.
Two stacked SA Nbox 5202’s provided 32 usable device ports which meet the
initial port requirement, as well as the tight budget. And simple scalability is
a necessity, because it’s hard to guess just how rapidly the storage volume
needs will increase, along with the editing effort and processors required
in the future digital planetary videos. The SA Nbox 5000 series switch can
scale all the way to 96 ports, or even more, and is the perfect solution for
accommodating this exponential growth in future phases.
The Configuration Wizard walks you through the steps to deploy the fabric
easily, without any help from any technical experts. The Beijing Planetarium
staff feel comfortable being able to observe their data traffic moving smoothly
across different ports. Also, SA Nbox 5000 allows the Planetarium staff to
configure the type of fault alarms they want, and where it should be sent to.
Though the Planetarium isn’t expecting any error message from the switch, in
the unlikely event of a system issue, they will be the first to know. And that’s
called peace of mind in an uncertain universe.
Infrastructure Diagram of the Beijing Planetarium Digital Video Program Editing Platform
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of their respectiv e owners. Information supplied by QL ogic is believed to be accurate and re liable. QLogic Corporation assume s no responsibility for any error s in this brochure. QLogic Corporation reserves the right, without notice, to make s changes in product
design or spec ifications.
SN0130915-00 R ev A 10/06
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