Over a Million GOGOBOX Web Service Members Rely on Infortrend Arrays to Stay Connected 24X7

Over a Million GOGOBOX Web Service Members Rely on Infortrend Arrays to Stay Connected 24X7

NEXTLINK TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD introduced GOGOBOX, an internet file sharing site, in May 2007 to keep up with the rapid growth of network storage services in Taiwan. GOGOBOX is a web space and services provider, giving each registered user a free 100GB web BOX (space) to start blog communities or share files. For a fee, users can become “Golden Metal BOX” members and upgrade to the “Ultimate Web BOX” for unlimited web space and permanent data storage.

In the first ten weeks of operation, more than 800,000 users registered for the service and more than 50,000 paid for the upgrade. Within just six months of its release, GOGOBOX had signed up over a million members.

IMPRESSIVE GROWTH DEMANDS IMPRESSIVE DATA STORAGE

Maintaining sufficient web space for a community this large is obviously a critical issue. “Considering that a million people could transfer data and upload or download files at the same time, bandwidth and data transfer speed were the key concerns from the system topology point of view,” said ChenHao Huang, technical manager at NextLink Technology.

After discussing GOGOBOX’s requirements with CLUBBOX, an original equipment supplier from Korea, NextLink decided to implement an enterprise-level storage system, either a Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), or Direct Attached Storage (DAS) system. NextLink considered storage systems from several manufacturers including products from Infortrend, Dell, EMC, Hewlett Packard, and NetApp.

After six weeks of testing, GOGOBOX decided to adopt Infortrend’s EonStor A16F-G2430 Fibre Channel-to-SATA RAID subsystem because the data transfer rate met their Ethernet benchmark of 35MB per second and the subsystem could be directly attached to file servers in a DAS topology.

FAST CONNECTION + DATA PROTECTION

SilverShine Technology Inc., the system integrator for the project, noted that the EonStor A16F-G2430 features a 4G Fibre Channel (4G-FC) interface that provides a fast connection between the host and file servers. For data protection, the system supports RAID6, which can handle two simultaneous hard drive failures, and allows the failed drives to be hotswapped so the storage system can run 24/7 without the threat of a shutdown or data loss. Storage administrators can take advantage of the centralized management feature to monitor and manage the arrays using simple settings, the userfriendly GUI, or their browser.

RELIABLE STORAGE = SATISFIED CUSTOMERS

Since implementation, NextLink is completely satisfied with Infortrend’s RAID arrays. “Not only are the subsystems easy to set up and manage, but the 24x7 service guarantee from SilverShine Technology and the three-year product warranty help ensure GOGOBOX’s goal of non-interrupted service,” added Mr. Huang.

To date, GOGOBOX has integrated 26 A16F-G2430 subsystems, each set up with RAID6 functionality and housing 16 500GB SATA-II hard disk drives for a total capacity up to 208TB. GOGOBOX plans to purchase more Infortrend subsystems in the near future to keep up with its rapidly growing membership by balancing the file servers’ load and guaranteeing quality service for its members.