Video Applications and the Network: Friends or Foes?
Everyone knows the +‘s and -‘s of real-time video applications for business. Plus points include more collaboration, stronger executive communications and easier-to-digest employee training. Some of the major downsides are a potentially large quantity of servers (as servers are often mapped to sets of end users, and not load balanced), much bigger bandwidth requirements to remote offices, and/or dedicated proxy servers at those remote offices getting video streams to distribute to end users, and the associated “pre-positioning” of those servers to receive the video each time a live session occurs.
With Cisco’s recent Data Center 3.0 announcement, the Company showed how the network can empower the delivery of video end-to-end, from the data center over the WAN to the remote office. Specifically, by leveraging the new “video smarts” in the ACE application switch family, customers can reduce the number of servers required to process and distribute video streams (can you say “load balancing for live video”?). And for the WAN and remote video viewers, customers can leverage new “video smarts” on the WAAS family to send single live video streams over the WAN, and then tee up multiple copies locally to send to end users in each remote office (see YouTube interview of WAAS video delivery, speaking of video).
A 2006 article written by another vendor and published by SearchNetworking highlighted several of these video delivery challenges, and yet video adoption continues to grow significantly.
So blog back to us—what are your thoughts on deploying live (or on-demand) video apps, and the server + network-related challenges? Do you have in production now, or thinking of? What’s your business goal or ROI target?
Posted by Mark Weiner at 07:37PM PST
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