Ming Hwa Yuan

Background

Ming Hwa Yuan Arts & Cultural Group was established in 1929 and has been the leading troupe in the performance genre of Taiwanese opera for a century. It is a pioneer in integrating traditional elements into the modern scene and successfully promotes traditional Taiwanese culture worldwide. For decades, Ming Hwa Yuan Arts & Cultural Group based on locally developed opera, integrated modern theater and cross-border art, and aimed to create an art brand of “Oriental Musical”. As one of the most representative theater troupes in Taiwan, Ming Hwa Yuan performs overseas on a regular basis, including Japan, Singapore, Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, United States, and South Africa, making the sounds of Taiwan more widely known for over eighty years.

Challenges

Ming Hwa Yuan has been established for nearly a century and continues the classic traditional arts of Taiwan. In recent years, it started preserving precious cultural assets with digital transformation. Recording each play produces many photos and audiovisual materials, which quickly made storing and transmitting files a huge issue. Their previous solution of storing videos on external hard drives led to time wasted trying to find specific hard drives, often needing to connect each one to see if it had the files they wanted. Ming Hwa Yuan also lost precious historical and cultural materials because there was no backup or warning notifications when the hard drive developed faults.

Solution

The solution was a 9-bay TS-h973AX NAS and TL-D800C JBOD storage enclosure as well as a QSW-M2108-2C L2 Web Managed Switch.

Both the TS-h973AX and TL-D800C use Toshiba N300 8TB NAS hard drives to provide huge and expandable storage space and are set up in RAID 5 for protection against disk failure.

At the same time, snapshots and secondary backups are enabled to ensure data security. In addition, the QuTS hero operating system on the TS-h973AX has the ability to self-repair data to maintain data integrity. The TL-D800C storage expansion enclosure also supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type-C transmission, making storage and backup tasks smoother and faster.

Ming Hwa Yuan uses QNAP NAS and Toshiba N300 8TB NAS hard drives to maximize the benefits of data security and storage. The N300 drives have high performance with up to 7,200 rpm and a maximum sustained transfer rate of 230 MB/s and use CMR technology to enhance the stability of reading and writing. It also has integrated RV sensors to compensate for rotational vibrations, helping to prolong drive health and enhance data security.

The TS-h973AX has one 10GBASE-T Multi-Gig and two 2.5GbE LAN ports. With the QSW-M2108-2C managed switch, QNAP built a smooth, secure and scalable high-speed network environment for Ming Hwa Yuan and improved their video editing capabilities with simplified workflows.

Ming Hwa Yuan not only repeatedly performs classic dramas, but also publishes at least one or two new performances every year. Therefore, they have thousands of photos which previously took significant time and effort to categorize. Now, Ming Hwa Yuan uses QNAP’s QuMagie AI photo management solution which can automatically recognize different actors, even when they are wearing stage costumes. QuMagie can also automatically categorize files by date, location, or in-image objects, greatly enhancing the ability to quickly find Ming Hwa Yuan images.

Result

QNAP provided Ming Hwa Yuan with comprehensive storage and networking solutions, solving their difficulties in digital transformation within the traditional art industry and enabling data security and backup for precious data. In addition, Ming Hwa Yuan can now rapidly find and categorize their files with a powerful AI engine. QNAP also built a high-speed collaboration environment to improve access times to large files. With their storage and performance challenges met, Ming Hwa Yuan has more time to focus on the innovation and continuation of traditional art culture.