Case Study: Xinhua News Agency achieves always-on global media access and secure archives with Hitachi Vantara

Xinhua News Agency Supports Object-Based Cloud Platform With Hitachi File and Content Technologies

Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the People’s Republic of China with more than 170 foreign bureaus, faced an aging audio‑visual library that could not scale to meet growing video and new‑media demands. The system held roughly 70,000 hours of media, relied on tape for archives, limited access for branch and extranet users, and lacked object‑level metadata and scalable ingest. To modernize, Xinhua engaged Hitachi Vantara to deploy an object‑based cloud using Hitachi NAS Platform and Hitachi Content Platform, plus Hitachi Data Ingestor for branch collection.

Hitachi Vantara implemented a private cloud with HNAS 4100 high‑availability gateways, HCP 500XL scale‑out object storage, Hitachi Unified Storage 150 and HDI VMs in branches, creating an online/archive platform designed to handle the agency’s ~120 hours/day ingest needs. The solution delivers up to ~4 GB/s aggregate NAS bandwidth and ~250 MB/s per HCP gateway, replaced tape with always‑on disk archives accessible via S3/HTTP/CIFS/NFS, automated branch uploads, and added RAID/multicopy/WORM protections. As a result, Hitachi Vantara’s deployment eliminated tape export delays, improved reliability and data security, enabled intranet/extranet access, and became Xinhua’s core platform for TV and new‑media services.

Xinhua News Agency

Jiao Lu

Leader of Cloud Media Asset Project Team Audio-Visual Data Division, Technology Department