Home Analysis Delivery Infrastructure How cloud and OpenStack can help operators to the next level

How cloud and OpenStack can help operators to the next level

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A segment of a diagram showing where CloudXtream fits into the workflow for delivering multiscreen TV including network DVR. Multiscreen ad insertion is excluded here. Downstream to the right is the CDN and clients

This was the year that the television industry turned its attention to the use of virtualization and cloud computing as a way to accelerate time-to-market and scale services with better CapEx and OpEx efficiencies. One company that was early to announce cloud capabilities was RGB Networks, which provides transcoding, packaging, nDVR and ad insertion solutions for IP streaming services, primarily targeting multiscreen deployments. Last autumn the company unveiled a cloud solution covering most of these functions and this year it added advertising insertion. It already has one customer deployed with its CloudXtream offer, the Mexican cable operator Telecable, while at least one North American cable operator is trialling its just-in-time packaging in a cloud environment. 

Andy Salo, Vice President of Product Management at RGB Networks, says the trigger point for adopting cloud video processing will be the need to monetize multiscreen TV. Network DVR and dynamic advertising insertion are considered two of the most promising revenue opportunities, and he says operators are interested in deploying these using a private cloud architecture initially, with a longer-term interest in using the public cloud. The main barrier today to greater use of public cloud architectures is network latency and content rights issues relating to storage. 

CloudXtream is an end-to-end video processing cloud-on-a-stick solution. Operators are literally given a USB stick. This contains OpenStack software, the business logic for managing the OpenStack cloud environments that are created, and the applications that will need to be managed in a private or public cloud, meaning the transcoding, packaging, recording and so on. 

OpenStack is effectively an open source cloud operating system (or computing platform) that is used to aggregate and manage resources from different places. This has gained considerable traction and is starting to look like the OS of choice for cloud deployments, given its growing vendor support. Once installed on a server, OpenStack can start to ‘sign-up’ other servers that can be used to build a cloud environment.

An initial building block for a cloud environment is the virtual machine: software functions that harness a certain amount of hardware (processing power or storage, etc.) from a hardware platform (like an HP server) that may also be running other virtual machines. Typically the software would otherwise run on its own dedicated appliance, like a ‘pizza box’ 1-RU or 2-RU processor or a chassis. Now the software is virtualized onto the remote shared hardware and this is the process known as virtualization. 

The next step, and what OpenStack enables, is the aggregation of different servers so that virtual machines can be created or used on those as well, and then managed as a shared resource. Salo says that a virtual machine is a component of a cloud infrastructure and when you talk about cloud, as opposed to virtualization, you are really talking about a set of servers that are available for use. “What really differentiates ‘cloud’ from ‘virtual’ is that you can auto-scale and burst to higher levels of capacity. You can source that additional capacity in a matter of seconds and that is cloud orchestration,” he explains. 

Salo likens the role of OpenStack to what Linux does on a local scale. “Linux manages memory and CPU and storage on one server. OpenStack does that across a set of servers.”

OpenStack knows the aggregate amount of storage and RAM and CPU processing power available. Driven by the business logic software that ensures applications are performed in the most effective and cost-effective way, OpenStack can ask to create a virtual machine and grab the processing or storage capacity it needs from wherever it needs to. 

As a result, OpenStack enables hundreds of ‘application instances’ to be ramped-up in just minutes. “It is a very effective way to create a cloud environment very quickly and put software applications right on top of it,” Salo explains. Operators can duplicate the environments they create in order to achieve redundancy inside a private cloud or by making use of a public cloud.

Hardware appliances that operators have deployed in their headends, such as the VMG high-density video processing chassis from RGB Networks (which in a ‘traditional’ deployment would host transcoding software, for example) can also be incorporated into the cloud as processing resources using OpenStack. “We are not moving away from that [the dedicated appliance running software model] but we are giving customers the flexibility to deploy in different ways,” Salo says.

nDVR is one of the functions that can make good use of cloud orchestration, or the addition of new resources from other servers as required. It was the first solution component that RGB Networks unveiled as part of CloudXtream at Cable-Tec Expo last October. The company says service providers are keen on network DVR but that the storage requirements are daunting, especially when used with multiscreen ‘TV Everywhere’ services, and that has slowed operator rollouts.

“For some geographies the reason is the regulatory requirement that service providers keep a copy of each nDVR programme a subscriber views. This number can be large given that as many as 12 separate profiles of each programme are required to support the growing number of smartphones, phablets, tablets, PCs, TVs and other viewing devices, and that each profile has to be packaged in the four leading adaptive bit rate streaming protocols: Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming and MPEG-DASH. Because all of these individual profiles have to be pre-stored to be ready for immediate streaming, the storage requirements are extensive and quite costly.”

RGB Networks says CloudXtream overcomes this by harnessing its Just-in-Time-Packaging (JITP) technology, which packages programmes into the appropriate streaming protocol only when requested by a subscriber. This approach requires that a single copy of each programme in the operator library needs to be stored in a mezzanine format. That dramatically reduces storage requirements and yields substantial capital and operational cost savings and the use of the cloud for this application helps contain costs. “Operators only pay for the storage and processing needed at any given moment, rather than investing in the hardware and software to support peak usage,” the vendor points out. The ability to scale rapidly, and then manage capacity up and down (which is known as elasticity) is also key.

Cost has been one of the barriers to service providers investigating ad insertion, which relies on manifest manipulation. Salo says cloud computing will help operators accommodate the large and fluctuating traffic loads associated with this function.

With the RGB Networks solution, operators can put the required video or ad processing applications into existing private and public clouds or they can put the software onto ‘bare metal servers’ to create a cloud. The data centre used to create a private cloud could be their headend. The vendor claims that CloudXtream is “the only turnkey approach that enables the deployment of an end-to-end multiscreen ad insertion or nDVR solution in an operator’s own data centre or hosted private cloud. It is designed so MSOs can have everything they need to fully leverage the potential of the cloud.” The company claims that by harnessing CloudXtream, operators can deploy services in minutes rather than weeks.

Telecable, the Mexican MSO and telco, is the first company to deploy CloudXtream commercially, having done this for its OTT multiscreen service, which has a national footprint. “There were several reasons we chose CloudXtream for this project, including the pioneering Just-in-Time packaging technology deployed in virtualized environments,” declared Luis E. Vielma Ordóñez, Chief Operating Officer of Telecable when the deployment was announced at NAB Show this year. “It enabled us to quickly roll out a full-featured multiscreen service while taking advantage of a cloud deployment to speed our time-to-market, provide flexibility and minimize total cost of ownership.” 

Salo believes RGB Networks can claim to have a long-standing cloud heritage (measured by the standards of this industry), pointing to its early adoption and use of OpenStack. “Our transcoding and packaging software products were architected at inception for virtualized deployments, so utilizing them in a cloud-based solution was straightforward,” he declares.

RGB Networks has been working with Sequencia Technologies, a leader in cloud automation systems, to deliver its end-to-end cloud solution. This company provides architecture and engineering services to major video service providers who are transitioning to virtualized infrastructure for service delivery. It has expertise in video delivery, unified communications and production-grade virtualized infrastructure. Sequencia says it can help operators build and implement a solid transition plan for all of their customer facing services, like nDVR.


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