Wenjin System Delivers High
Search Speeds
National Library of China Project
Based on its deep analysis and understanding of customer needs, its powerful
server development capabilities, and rich experience in solution provisioning,
Huawei provided an industry-leading search solution featuring high search and
retrieval speeds for the NLC. This solution delivered improved search performance,
reduced TCO, and enhanced user experience.
Background
The National Library of China (NLC) is the largest national library in Asia and the third largest in the world. The digital resources of this
institution have total 500 TB, containing approximately 200 million pages. By establishing a mechanism to build and share resources with
other public libraries in China, the National Digital Library of China (a parallel entity and off-shoot of NLC) plans to integrate all the
resources, including their own and those purchased.
Key Challenges
Traditional methods in searching for books and retrieving information are comparatively slow, and users are now expecting to obtain results
much quicker than before. The Library was faced with the following challenges:
• Inferior user experience
The Library did not have an efficient IT-based management system so information retrieval was still slow and time-consuming, requiring a
semi-automatic combination of manual effort and computer processing. The information retrieval system could handle services rather
quickly when the number of access requests were average, but would display responses at extremely slow speeds, usually at one-fifth or
one-tenth that of the normal speed, during holidays or when requests for accessing popular books reached peak volume.
• High upgrade cost
To cope with spikes in access requests during holidays and when high volume requests for popular books were made, NLC would have
required a new large-scale data center if traditional information retrieval methods were used. The new data center would require several
dozen times more servers than those previously deployed, translating into heavy investment and enormous costs in operation and
maintenance. During ordinary days, most of these servers will be idle – an enormous waste of resources. The trade-off between user
experience, performance requirements during peak usage days, and operating costs would be difficult to balance; a viable and cost-effective
solution was badly needed.
To address this dilemma, NLC decided to use Internet-based search technology and computing platforms to establish its own search
system–the Wenjin search system. The Library plans to achieve a balance between user expectations and total cost of ownership (TCO).
Solution
Huawei provided an industry-leading search solution featuring high search and retrieval speeds for the NLC. This solution delivered
improved search performance, reduced TCO, and enhanced user experience.
• Enhanced user experience
The high speed search solution is comprised of the RH2285 server and solid-state drive (SSD). This solution uses a software and hardware
integration scheme that dynamically stores hot topics into the SSD. With the integration and use of a search engine algorithm, this solution
can respond quickly to search requests during holidays, which improves user experience while reducing TCO.
• Customization and system optimization
Based on its deep understanding of customer's requirements on search capabilities, Huawei customized and optimized the server and SSD
and provided a software and hardware integration solution, providing a faster search speed.
Customer Benefits
• Improved user experience, and five-time increase in response speed during peak hours
Compared with traditional hard drives with an access speed ranging from 4 to 10 milliseconds when spinning at 15,000 rpm, Huawei SSDs
have an average access speed of 0.01 to 0.1 milliseconds, hundreds times shorter. Practically, the Huawei solution delivers a five-fold
improvement to response speeds during peak usage.
• Over 30% reduction in power consumption and investment
○ Reduced power consumption: Compared with traditional hard drives with power consumption rated at 10w, Huawei SSDs consume only
3w power when active.
○ Improved performance: The search service bottleneck is in the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) of the hard drives. Huawei
SSDs are hundreds of times faster than traditional hard drives, allowing searches of small files at high speeds.
○ Reduced costs: The search system is expected to respond to 10,000 search requests per second, which means that four to six servers would
have been required if hard drives were used. Now only one server would be required because the solution used the SSD, which also
substantially reduced the physical deployment space needed in the data centers.
The Wenjin search system constitutes a major part of the NLC digitization process. The system has provided a
successful model for NLC's digitization and will largely contribute to the digitization of other libraries in China.