An All-Flash Data Lake Accelerates UHD Transformation for Broadcasting and Television

During major sports events, ultra-high definition (UHD) broadcasts place the audience firmly in the front row, capturing every thrilling moment in stunning clarity. Switch channels and artificial intelligence (AI)-restored 4K classics transport movie lovers through time, allowing them to relive iconic stories from the past.

Today, the broadcasting and television industry stands at the dawn of a full UHD transformation, with 4K and even 8K resolution videos reshaping how content is created and delivered.

The industry's history shows that every such shift in content format triggers a complete evolution across the wider broadcasting and television ecosystem. And, in this new wave of transformation, breakthroughs in storage capabilities have become critical for the implementation of UHD technologies. The UHD All-Flash Data Lake Solution, jointly built by the Hunan Broadcasting System Media Group (HBS) and Huawei, is now paving a pioneering path for the industry.

Accelerating UHD Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges

UHD technologies represent a new round of technological transformation in the display industry, following waves of digitalization and HD transformation.

Since 2019, China's National Radio and Television Administration has issued a series of policies to drive UHD transformation. In 2022, it set the goal of large-scale UHD adoption. Later, in 2025, it introduced the Action Plan for Accelerating the Development of High-Quality UHD Programs. This initiative aims to encourage TV stations operating at, or above, the prefecture level (China's second-level administrative division, below provinces) to expand UHD programs, in order to accelerate industry-wide UHD transformation.

In June 2024, HBS took the lead by launching a systematic UHD construction initiative, completing the entire process—from solution design to project implementation—within a single year. As a result, several of its well-known UHD variety shows, such as Singer and Hello, Saturday, have achieved impressive ratings thanks in part to the comprehensive upgrade of the broadcaster's technical system.

HBS carried out a full-process reconstruction in modules, batches, and projects, covering multiple scenarios such as outside broadcasting (OB) vans, playout, post-production, and data transfer. This approach ultimately streamlined the entire workflow for UHD production and broadcasting. That said, several challenges had to be overcome. For example, upgrading from high definition (HD) to 4K resolution increases the volume of program material data by more than a factor of five. Multi-camera recordings can generate up to 500 TB of 4K material files for a single program. This rapid growth in data creates an even greater challenge—improving data processing efficiency. During program production, editors often need to simultaneously import multi-channel audio and video files into editing software. Then, when dragging and dropping audio and video tracks during editing, slow response times and frozen video playback severely hinder production efficiency.

To overcome these challenges, HBS identified core requirements for its storage systems.

First, high bandwidth and low latency were essential. When handling massive volumes of 4K and 8K material, high-performance storage is crucial to delivering stable read and write bandwidth and low latency. This ensures rapid data interaction between systems and storage devices, supporting the entire production process from editing to finished product output, as well as 24/7 stable broadcasting.

Next, complex service processes needed to be addressed. Every TV station's service system spans multiple stages, including ingestion, editing, playout, and media asset management (MAM), among others. These stages are often handled by separate storage systems, leading to redundant data storage and wasted storage space. Plus, the need to copy large files across systems consumes significant production time.

With these two things in mind, HBS knew that it needed a unified storage resource pool that would eliminate data silos between service stages. This promised to improve cross-system data transmission efficiency and simplify operations and maintenance (O&M) and management. Ultimately, such a storage system supports UHD transformation by enabling an efficient full-link production and broadcasting system.

An All-Flash Data Lake: A Game-Changer for UHD Transformation

There were several core requirements lying at the heart of HBS's transformation—high bandwidth, low latency, large capacity, fast data migration, high reliability, and easy management. That meant that the reconstruction of its storage system couldn't rely on simply making minor adjustments to traditional architectures. Instead, it necessitated complete innovation, from the underlying technology to the overall architectural design.

To address all of this, HBS and Huawei jointly developed the UHD All-Flash Data Lake Solution based on OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage.

It starts with high bandwidth and low latency—the foundation to truly fluid real-time editing. For demanding 4K and 8K workflows, storage systems need to simultaneously deliver high read and write performance to multiple workstations.

With a stable single-node read bandwidth of 2.3 GB/s—peaking at 5 GB/s—Huawei OceanStor Pacific all-flash scale-out storage is the powerhouse that lies behind high-concurrency UHD workflows. What does that mean? In real-world scenarios, the proxy editing layers of 4K audio and video increase from just 80 to a staggering 250. With OceanStor Pacific, the result is a seamless, stutter-free experience even when handling such heavy workloads, with zero lag during multi-layer editing and super-smooth playback.

The solution's high capacity and support for rapid migration eliminate the headaches of wasted resources and complex management. Traditional storage for broadcasting often suffers from siloed architecture, where key workflows like ingestion, editing, and playout act as isolated islands. Consequently, the same media assets are often stored redundantly across different systems, eating up valuable space and dragging down efficiency due to cross-system data transfer.

Deploying OceanStor Pacific, HBS built a UHD All-Flash Data Lake with a converged storage pool. Now, a single data copy of the storage system can be accessed and used by multiple application systems, centralizing management and eliminating redundancy. An intelligent tiering policy also automatically identifies data access frequency. For example, data requiring high-speed read and write or frequent access is automatically placed on high-performance storage nodes. Data with lower performance requirements or infrequent access is migrated to more economical nodes while still remaining instantly accessible. This dynamic approach to data placement has drastically improved data management efficiency for HBS.

Finally, addressing the dual challenges of scalability and performance, the UHD All-Flash Data Lake Solution overcomes the inherent limitations of traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) by completely upgrading the performance layer to all-flash scale-out storage. Following its transformation, HBS's system performance has increased by more than a factor of three, while capacity density has improved by more than a factor of 11. There has also been a significant reduction in terms of energy consumption. In addition, scale-out storage performance scales linearly with capacity expansion, placing one foot firmly in the future. In short, its all-flash evolution has empowered HBS to maximize resource utilization.

All-flash architecture also reserves the necessary space for integrating emerging technologies like AI, laying the groundwork for intelligent media production. In this context, a UHD all-flash data lake is positioned as a future-oriented media data processing platform. Its value will continue to be unlocked and released as technology continues to advance.

A UHD All-Flash Data Lake Is a Paradigm Shift for Media Storage

A UHD all-flash data lake's value goes far beyond its technological features, truth be told. It is about fundamentally reshaping the logic of content production and providing significant inspiration for broadcasting's digital transformation.

Storage infrastructure sets the ceiling for creative ambition. No matter how advanced the cameras are—or how brilliant the creative concepts seem to be—without powerful underlying storage infrastructure, they simply cannot deliver the superior, seamless experience audiences now expect and demand.

The UHD all-flash data lake improves non-linear editing and catalyzes a production efficiency revolution in 4K and 8K imaging. Editors are liberated from the drag of storage latency, allowing them to dedicate their focus entirely to creativity. And the smoothness of multi-track editing now makes the realization of complex effects possible, resulting in programs with more immersive visual effects.

A second key shift for storage in broadcasting is elevating the focus from merely storing data to actively managing data value. Where traditional media casts storage as a cost center, a UHD all-flash data lake transforms the entire storage system into a powerful value creation engine. By implementing full-lifecycle data management, the UHD All-Flash Data Lake Solution optimizes resource use while simultaneously building high-value media data assets. These assets form the bedrock for intelligent media production, providing the essential training data for applications like intelligent editing and content generation.

Last but not the least, HBS and Huawei have created a model of joint industry innovation, where the media partner contributes essential business insight and Huawei supplies the core technology to act on it. This is an additional—significant—focus for the joint project: Building a technological ecosystem for the wider broadcasting industry to learn from. And the result? A jointly engineered, industry-ready storage infrastructure solution with replicable value that points the way to significantly accelerating UHD transformation across the entire industry.

The merger of creativity and technology expands visual boundaries and fundamentally enhances how audiences experience content. Although the age of UHD is only just beginning, breakthroughs in storage technology already provide the necessary infrastructure to access and process a wider, richer visual world.