Case Study: Dwango achieves 4:1 server consolidation and faster, lower‑cost video caching with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory

Dwango Cuts Video Sharing Cache Costs With Fusion Iomemory™ Solutions

Dwango’s Nico‑Nico Douga is one of Japan’s largest video‑sharing sites (over 26 million registered users and 1.5 million paid subscribers) and was struggling to scale its disk‑based video‑hosting cache tier. Rapid growth and frequent traffic spikes exposed slow disk I/O, rising hardware and operating costs, and an unwieldy infrastructure footprint that needed consolidation without sacrificing user experience.

Dwango replaced disk nodes with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory ioDrive cards, moving hot video content onto a high‑performance, scalable cache. The change cut the server count from 200 to 50 (4:1 consolidation), eliminated 1,600 hard‑disk failure points, reduced business‑intelligence job runtimes from about a day to hours, and significantly lowered energy and maintenance costs while ensuring consistent performance during traffic spikes.

Dwango

Tetsuya Sato

Infrastructure Manager