Upgrading Hamad International Airport

Background

Safeguarding the Arabian Gulf

Hamad International Airport (HIA) has been classified as a five-star airport by Skytrax, and is one among only five other airports in the world to achieve this prestigious status. The airport is recognized by the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards as the Sixth Best Airport in the World. HIA can handle 8,700 passengers per hour, more than 30 million passengers a year, and is currently undergoing further expansion to accommodate more than 50 million passengers. The airport is strategically located at the crossroads of the East and West sides of the globe, serving more than 150 destinations across every continent. Around 80 percent of the world’s population is within a six-hour flight from HIA, positioning the airport as the gateway to Qatar, the Gulf, and the world.

Challenges

Video Cloud Gains Popularity with Distributed Storage

HIA currently has more than 10,000 installed CCTV cameras, with significant increases planned as part of its expansion. The airport had been using legacy NVRs as its main storage, which it wanted to replace 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 toward HD and adding intelligent utilities and analytics into the mix. Customers are paying more attention to capture quality, responsiveness, processing speed, and application overlays — and require solutions that can apply scenario-specific processes to their layouts, instead of just receiving and transmitting video and images. All of these require high-performance, scalable, and distributed storage systems, which are an ideal fit for centralized video cloud management.

Solution

With its distributed architecture, Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 meets the airport’s requirements by providing easy expansion and centralized management. Huawei is the first vendor to use large-capacity disks (10 TB per disk) in its solutions for video surveillance, which leverage a high-density layout for storing HD video on a single node. Huawei’s solution meets HIA’s performance requirements and significantly reduces both equipment room footprints and power consumption.

High Performance Puts HIA’s Concerns to Rest

HIA’s system performance requirements were challenging, as individual storage nodes were required to support as many channels as possible. The airport required POC test results, and selected a vendor with products that could deliver superior performance, scalability, and capabilities.

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

OceanStor 9000 uses non-blocking check technology to support more concurrent video streams and ensure zero frame loss, even with heavy usage demands. Intelligent file aggregation technology greatly enhances video and image storage efficiency and improves storage utilization, which meets video recording, access, forwarding, and intelligent analysis requirements. OceanStor 9000 evenly balances video access workloads and dynamically manages resources to improve data handling efficiency.

Robust Security and Solid Reliability Earn HIA’s Approval

Unexpected events occur frequently at airports, and security personnel must quickly pinpoint incident locations and surveillance videos to assist in decision-making. HIA needed to store video data securely as per its defined, yet evolving, video retention policy.

With 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 superb performance, solid stability, and high availability, even with high usage demands.

The distributed architecture of the OceanStor 9000 protects data among nodes and can withstand failures of up to four nodes in a single storage system without disrupting business. Storage capacity and computing capabilities 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

HIA ultimately chose Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 Video Cloud Storage Solution because of its high-density, large capacity design, best-of-breed performance, robust scalability, and solid reliability. Video cloud solution benefits include:

Huawei’s video cloud storage places video, images, audio, and other types of data into one system for centralized management and access. The system supports a single namespace with a capacity of 100 PB, fulfilling technical video surveillance platform requirements as well as capacity expansion needs over the next five years. OceanStor 9000 delivers future-proof video analysis capabilities and a unified platform for efficient video data analysis.