Japanese Karaoke Solution Provider XING Chooses Infinidat

Infinidat Ltd announced that XING, Inc., in the commercial karaoke industry in Japan, consolidated its enterprise storage on the InfiniBox platform, simplifying its infrastructure, improving performance, saving space, and achieving an annual cost savings of 80% by substantially reducing the equipment and maintenance costs associated with the previous storage devices.

In the 5 years that XING has been using Infinidat solutions, there has been no downtime – an accomplishment that differentiates Infinidat’s storage solution for its constant, reliable uptime.

“The main reason we decided to select Infinidat was that it is extremely reliable. We know we can trust Infinidat to deliver high performance at scale and prevent any technological issues,” said Akihiro Sakai, chief conductor of the infrastructure strategy group, XING. “Storage consolidation was one of the best things we could have ever done for our data infrastructure.“

The increase in data had been a challenge for XING to manage, as the number of songs in the karaoke systems increases by the tens of thousands each year. The industry’s shift to higher quality audio − digital to real sound − and images − from standard definition to high definition − has also added to the exponential growth of the amount of data. Experimenting with different storage products and short-term decisions to expand capacity to deal with this data growth led the enterprise to have too many storage arrays across too many suppliers. Maintenance of the complexity became cumbersome and costly. XING needed to consolidate its 27 storage systems from 4 different suppliers to a much smaller number of highly scalable enterprise storage arrays to simplify operations and drive cost out of the data infrastructure, while simultaneously expanding its ability to handle the exponential growth in data volumes.

XING selected InfiniBox as the preferred enterprise storage platform in 2018. Consolidation of storage into this single array reduced the number of racks from 4 to one, which, in turn, reduced the equipment and maintenance costs associated with the previous storage devices. Due to the subsequent increase in data volume, the decision was made to migrate to a larger capacity InfiniBox at the end of 2022 − amounting to 2 InfiniBox in total. XING also took advantage of Infinidat’s flexible, Capacity-on-Demand consumption model, resulting in more cost-effective enterprise storage. XING has deployed 1.5PB of basic capacity and reserves 0.5PB as excess capacity (2PB in total).

Yoshihide Imamura, who led the group’s storage implementation, said: “We were able to complete the design of the new storage implementation in about a week, whereas, it would have taken about a month with other companies’ products.“

Sakai added: “Infinidat’s ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ approach has been put into practice, resulting in no more storage-intensive work for our team. At the same time, the enhancement to the performance has been exceptional. Compared to the previous storage system, IO/s has been improved by a factor of 5x, and the efficiency of the system has increased significantly.“

Eric Herzog, CMO, Infinidat, said: “XING is a great example of an enterprise that truly understands the value of consolidating storage on a platform with 100% availability guaranteed to eliminate complexity and achieve cost savings, while improving performance and expanding capacity with a flexible consumption model. With its enhanced storage infrastructure based on InfiniBox, XING has the advanced capabilities to manage its rapidly rising data volumes. The karaoke solution leader is demonstrating how it can serve its customers in Japan, and around the world, by having a highly available and performant Infinidat solution supporting the karaoke applications of all types to reach people of all ages and walks of life without interruption.“

XING intends to utilize the hybrid cloud integration functions that Infinidat provides across the boundaries between on-premises and cloud. In addition, by using the first InfiniBox as a secondary storage solution, the company plans to use it as a robust foundation for DR and BC.

Case study: Karaoke Solution Provider XING Consolidates Storage with InfiniBox to Lower Costs and Improve Performance and Management