feature green broadcasting

Feature sponsored by Harris

Dimitris Papavassiliou, head of digital workflow solutions media & broadcasters, Europe, at Cisco reports.

Energy efficiency in

broadcast production

B

y reducing the carbon footprint associated with the handling and transporting of physical media, migrating to digital workflows can have a

strong positive impact on energy efficiency. This impact has never been sufficiently analysed, in part because the economic benefits in digitising the production processes are so overwhelming that any further analysis has seemed unnecessary. However, by moving to network- production and IT-based systems, the media industry can start using some of the best practices developed by IT over the last decade. These practices enable IT professionals to design power and cooling efficiencies in their facilities, particularly in their data centres. Applying these practices will, in turn, help production technology professionals to dramatically decrease their carbon footprints and ultimately help them achieve carbon neutrality in their own facilities.

Dimitris

Papavassiliou, head of digital workflow solutions media &

broadcasters, Europe, at Cisco.

Energy-efficient digital workflows

Media workflows have historically been based on self-contained production systems, with video content transported and managed via physical media. Even when media companies adopt digital file-based systems in some areas (such as post- production or newsroom processes), these systems are usually managed as independent ‘silos’, supported by dedicated servers, storage and networks. Furthermore, when new applications are implemented, additional servers are often deployed along with new storage capacity. Implementing energy-efficient digital workflows requires an open, flexible, and interoperable infrastructure that can efficiently pool applications and resources, and dynamically invoke the right processes at the right time, through each stage in the workflow. Migrating production facilities to a Cisco media data centre can dramatically increase server, storage, and network utilisation, making it possible to maintain service levels with far fewer power-consuming appliances. This highly efficient platform is ideal for delivering and accelerating services, providing security, and orchestrating application- delivery networks, servers, virtualised computing, and storage. All this while providing greater responsiveness, increasing operational and energy efficiency, and responsibly utilising valuable natural resources.

16 l ibe l march/april 2010 l www.ibeweb.com

Resource segregation over a converged network

While a well-engineered, intelligent network can sufficiently support different application data flows, including media and non-media traffic, certain security and operational policies may require network resources to be segregated. The way to achieve that is usually by deploying a separate network infrastructure. Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches can be segmented into virtual devices according to business needs. Cisco Virtual Device Context (VDC) delivers true segregation of network traffic, context-level fault isolation, and management through the creation of independent hardware and software partitions. VDCs are not related to each other; they are fully separated from the physical layer and software point of view, including the system resources distributed between the different contexts.

VDCs can help to virtually build the exact amount of network resources required for a dedicated media network in virtual contexts, eliminating the need to dedicate a network switch just for this use. For example, production IT managers can start deploying a small media network to support an editing environment with a few 1-Gbps or 10-Gbps interfaces, enabling additional resources ‘on demand’ while the editing system grows. This can be done on the fly, without disrupting the network. Other VDCs from the same Cisco Nexus 7000 Series can be used

Continued on Page 18. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48