KIES Co., Ltd.

Background

As a specialized organization producing educational materials for the Kawaijuku Group, KIES creates and manages educational videos and digital materials across sites in Nagoya (Chikusa North Building) and Tokyo (Oji-Kamiya and Yotsuya). As education rapidly digitalized, its infrastructure hit its limits on every front, making a complete overhaul an urgent priority for both management and IT.

Challenges

Petabyte-scale data growth overwhelms existing storage
With the full-scale rollout of an LMS (Learning Management System) from 2021 onward, the types and volume of data KIES handles, including educational videos, video courses, digital learning materials, and assessment data, grew rapidly. The existing storage (approx. 160 TB) quickly filled up, and total data volume reached the petabyte scale. Nightly inter-site synchronization and backups barely protected daytime production work, but the infrastructure could not keep pace with the growth, and the lack of capacity and scalability became a chronic operational burden.

35-second course searches: legacy bottlenecks slow down production
On the legacy system (IA servers + SAS HDD storage), every course extraction in the LMS production application took around 35 seconds. For staff who routinely work with thousands of courses and tens of thousands of content items, these delays added up to an enormous loss of time and significantly reduced production efficiency. In addition, key servers and storage reached EoL (end of support) around 2020, and simply expanding capacity was no longer enough. Rebuilding the aging environment from the ground up and migrating to an integrated platform that could withstand ever-growing demand became urgent.

Production cannot stop: Nankai Trough risk and pressing BCP needs
Nagoya, home to the headquarters and main site, lies within the area expected to be affected by a Nankai Trough earthquake. Data loss or business disruption in a disaster would directly affect the delivery of learning materials to students preparing for entrance exams. If production of digital or print materials were to stop, the impact on the educational services of the entire Kawaijuku Group would be unavoidable. Building inter-site data synchronization and a BCP environment to keep production running even in an emergency was not merely an IT issue, but a top management priority.

Solution

In renewing its production environments for digital and video learning materials, KIES has leveraged the functionality of QNAP NAS.

The fundamental goal was to handle and reliably store the rapidly growing volume of digital and video learning materials, in addition to educational data accumulated over many years. After evaluating configurations from various angles, KIES focused on the improved functionality of the QNAP NAS it had been using on a trial basis, and concluded that deploying the right appliance servers would improve not only cost efficiency but also operations and availability.

While general-purpose IA servers are used for some core functions, most of the environment runs on QNAP appliance servers of various specifications, each selected for its intended purpose. For environments that require high database performance but hold relatively small amounts of data, KIES built a virtualization platform for production on all-flash NAS, hosting production applications/databases and AD servers. For large data such as video, KIES built an editing and archiving environment on high-capacity storage with SSD caching, and established a BCP environment through inter-site data transfer.

The various applications provided with QuTS hero (QTS) make it possible to build the environment reliably and easily, which has also improved operational and maintenance efficiency.

Results

A stable platform for storing and delivering educational videos
By building the environment in stages, KIES now operates petabyte-scale data stably. The deployment of QNAP NAS established a high-capacity storage platform that reliably stores educational videos and digital learning materials, creating an environment for efficiently managing the data needed to deliver videos for absent students and to produce and archive video courses.

A backup target in normal times, a production environment in emergencies
Moving away from a configuration built solely on general-purpose IA servers, KIES leveraged the advanced features of appliance servers from QNAP and other vendors. Combined with cloud infrastructure and general-purpose IA servers, this achieves a good balance of deployment cost, operation and maintenance, productivity, and data protection. In normal times, QNAP NAS serves as storage for archiving and delivering videos and as a backup target for the digital learning material production environment. In an emergency, the virtual environment on the NAS allows minimum digital material production to continue until the main environment is restored.

Faster LMS production with all-flash NAS
With all-flash NAS, KIES has significantly accelerated the App/DB environment that manages thousands of learning courses and tens of thousands of content items for producing LMS video and digital learning materials. Course extraction in the LMS production application (PostgreSQL environment) was confirmed to be faster, from 35 seconds to under 1 second compared with the legacy storage (measured during operational testing of the deployed configuration).
KIES also upgraded its network, building an environment with up to 40 Gbps internally and 10 Gbps or more between sites. This enables smooth data handling and makes full use of the potential of the all-flash NAS.

A BCP environment built on inter-site synchronization
Because video data is large (including master data for editing), full synchronization between sites is performed nightly. For LMS data, in addition to a redundant core server configuration, a temporary production environment has been set up in a different region and synchronized with the core servers, ensuring business continuity in the event of a disaster.