Qatar Airport Adopts Secure Cloud Storage

Background

Hamad International Airport (HIA) has been classified as a five-star airport by Skytrax, making it one of five other airports in the world to achieve this prestigious status. The airport is also ranked Sixth Best Airport in the World by the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. Currently, the airport can handle 8,700 passengers per hour, more than 30 million passengers a year, and is undergoing further expansion to accommodate more than 50 million passengers. HIA is in Dohar, capital of Qatar. It is conveniently located at the crossroads of East and West — serving more than 150 destinations across all continents — and the gateway to Qatar, the nearby Gulf, and to the world. About 80 percent of the world’s population is within a six-hour flight from HIA. 

Challenges

With large numbers of people and goods passing through every day, airports require very high levels of security

HIA needed to replace its legacy Network Video Recorders (NVRs) with a modern high availability,  scalable, and distributed storage system to support the planned increase in the number of high-definition cameras

Solution

HIA ultimately chose Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 video cloud storage solution because of its high-density, large-capacity design, top performance, robust scalability, and solid reliability.

Distributed Storage on a Centralized Video Cloud

HIA currently has over 10,000 installed CCTV cameras, with a significant increase planned as part of the airport’s expansion. HIA had been using legacy NVRs as its main storage. However, they wanted to replace the NVRs with high performing, scalable, and reliable Network Attached Storage that could cost-efficiently manage all of its video data.

Globally, video surveillance systems are moving towards HD and adding intelligent utilities and analytics into the mix. Customers like HIA are paying more attention to quality, responsiveness, processing speed, and application overlays. Customers also require solutions that can apply scenario-specific processes to their layouts, instead of just ingesting and transmitting video and images. All of these require high-performance, scalable, and distributed storage systems — an ideal fit for centralized video cloud management.

With its distributed architecture, Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 provides the easy expansion and centralized cloud management that satisfies HIA’s requirements. Its solution uses the high-density layout to store HD video on a single cloud storage node. Huawei’s solution meets HIA’s performance and power consumption needs, and significantly reduces equipment room footprint requirements.

High Performance Puts HIA’s Concerns to Rest

HIA’s system performance requirements were very challenging. It required individual storage nodes to support as many channels as possible. The airport also required Proof-of-Concept (PoC) test results.

At a minimum, the OceanStor 9000 uses three-node clusters and can support 1,200 video channels (at the same bit rate as the one on the live network). This means that each node supports 400 channels, without any frame loss.

The OceanStor 9000 uses non-blocking check technology to support more concurrent video streams and ensure zero frame loss even under heavy pressure. Intelligent file aggregation technology greatly enhances the efficiency of video and image storage and improves storage utilization, which meets the requirements for video recording, access, forwarding, and intelligent analysis. The OceanStor 9000 also balances video access workloads evenly and manages resources dynamically, significantly improving data handling efficiency.

Robust Security and Solid Reliability

Unexpected events occur frequently at airports, and security personnel must be able to pinpoint their location quickly and bring up surveillance videos to assist in decision making. HIA needed its storage systems to store video data securely as per its defined, yet still-evolving, video retention policy.

In Huawei’s solution, if an outage occurs on a node, the remaining nodes in the distributed cluster can still handle HD video from 1,600 channels without any frame loss. Test results showed that the OceanStor 9000 could provide the performance, stability, and high availability HIA needs, even under intense pressure.

The distributed architecture of the OceanStor 9000 protects data among nodes and can withstand the failure of up to four nodes in a single storage system without disrupting business. Storage capacity and computing capability grow as more nodes are added, delivering linear increases in bandwidth and concurrency. The system uses an N+2:1 redundancy algorithm, which can tolerate the failure of two disks in a node or one node in the system, to balance disk utilization while ensuring data reliability.

Benefits