Technology Enablement: ACTAPIO

Creating Value with Leading-Edge Cloud Infrastructure Technologies That Meet Global Standards

Promoting service innovation and cost competitiveness through the construction of a big data infrastructure

Increased operational costs of data centers caused by an increase in the volume of transactions and data

Yahoo! JAPAN provided a wide range of Internet services and boasted a huge number of page views. It was an important issue for Yahoo! JAPAN to utilize the huge amount of data obtained from it to innovate existing businesses and create new businesses.

From an early stage, they adopted “Hadoop,” a middleware that accumulates and analyzes large-scale data by distributed processing technology. And they transformed big data into "living information" and used it to improve and develop services such as adding recommendation functions.

However, transactions and data volumes have increased dramatically due to the spread of smartphones. They faced the heavy burden of expanding their existing data center systems in Japan and controlling the ever-increasing cost of electricity.

As a countermeasure, they launched a new in-house data center which incorporated the latest mechanisms in Washington, USA. We proposed and introduced a big data infrastructure that complies with the "OCP (Open Compute Project)" specifications, and supported the project as a partner.

"We are aiming to be the world's top class. There were various restrictions, but I told CTC America that I would like to go for it," said Mr Norifumi Matsuya of Actapio, a US subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan, in charge of Yahoo! Japan’s overall infrastructure. 

In March 2015, CTC America met Mr. Matsuya and learned that the company was pushing ahead with its infrastructure reforms while facing several challenges. CTC America proposed that the problem could be solved by building a big data infrastructure in compliance with the OCP (Open Compute Project).

In the United States, it was the mainstream that service providers that require large-scale infrastructure such as "web scale" and "hyper scale" which process big data already procured the equipment without depending on a specific vendors.

OCP is an engineer community that follows that trend. Launched in 2011 by Facebook with the aim of promoting open source of hardware design and specifications for servers, etc., members include hardware vendors such as Intel and IBM, and software vendors such as Microsoft and VMware. More than 150 companies around the world were listed at that time.

CTC was certified as a solution provider by the Open Compute Project Foundation, the operating organization of OCP, after participating in a hardware hackathon hosted by Facebook in the United States. And CTC had begun selling, designing, building and maintaining products officially certified by the OCP.

By adopting OCP, we aim to become a next-generation data center that realizes a scalable computing environment with low power consumption and low cost. CTC America was convinced of this and visited Facebook's data center with Mr. Matsuya.

"It should have a base infrastructure that could accumulate and analyze big data and create new services. It was attractive because it had a simple structure and scale-out model so that it could flexibly handle huge amounts of data. We decided to adopt it because it has the best operating record in the world among servers that can be purchased." (Mr. Matsuya)

He considered the use of OCP with CTC America, and we proceeded with the hardware procurement all the way to system integration and quality verification before the operation.

We built a Hadoop platform system consisting of 1200 servers and 120 petabytes of storage that can process big data with high efficiency.

With the explosive spread of the Internet, Yahoo! Japan has continued to make great strides by advocating for a "problem-solving engine" that solves human and social issues with the power of IT.

By implementing an OCP-compliant Hadoop platform, it became possible to process large amounts of big data with higher efficiency than ever before and IT costs were reduced at the same time. The company is also utilizing the know-how gained through this project to strengthen their system in Japan.

In addition to the OCP-compliant Hadoop platform, CTC America also supported the building ACTAPIO’s infrastructure management environment using the open-source cloud management software OpenStack and the container management software "kubernetes." Starting from OCP, we will thoroughly supported using the latest technology at the application layer as well.

"We chose CTC America as our partner in the United States because they conveyed an attitude of tackling issues with the same mindset as ours. I hope that CTC, which has a wealth of know how as a multi-vendor and a strong connection with the world, will continue to move forward together as a business partner. " (Mr. Matsuya)

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