Cisco's ECDS is designed to make it easier for enterprises to scale and optimize their video distribution capabilities without interfering with other traffic on the network.
Cisco Systems is rolling out a set of appliances designed to help businesses
manage and optimize the rapidly growing amount of video network traffic.
Cisco
on July 7 unveiled its ECDS (Enterprise Content Delivery System), a collection
of technologies that together are aimed at enabling businesses to better scale
and deliver high-quality live and on-demand video to users throughout their
organization, regardless of location or device.
Content
delivery is becoming a significant concern for businesses as the use of video
continues to grow within enterprises, according to Guido Jouret, vice president
and general manager of Cisco's Enterprise Video Group and CTO
of the Emerging Technologies Group. Video communication is becoming more than
just video conferencing, Jouret said in an interview with eWEEK.
Enterprises
increasingly are using video for everything from meetings and communications to
education and training, he said. Given that, the need to deliver this
high-quality video-both live and on-demand-to employees, customers and business
partners is growing in importance.
"Our
customers are going very big into video," Jouret said.
The
numbers bear that out, he said. Cisco believes that video will be the key
driver in the tripling of IP traffic by 2015 and that there will be a 300
percent growth in video adoption by 2016. In addition, Cisco officials say that
more than 10,000 companies worldwide currently are using Cisco video
technology.
Cisco
officials have grown out their video
communications portfolio of products, and now are doing the same with their
video content delivery products. Enterprises are looking for tools that will
enable them to scale and optimize their video content and deliver it to where
it wants to go without hinder the quality of the video or interfering with
other network traffic.
Cisco's
ECDS, part of its larger
medianet architecture, includes hardware appliances and the company's WAAS
(Wide Area Application Services) virtual blade architecture that work together
to enable businesses to deliver live video through streaming or multicasting,
and one-demand video via caching and pre-positioning. It can be deployed either
as a set of appliances or virtual machines, according to Janice Le Litvinoff,
general manager of Cisco's Digital Media Systems Group.
With
the intelligent caching capability, businesses can move video across the WAN
during hours of lighter traffic, then have it cached for later use by the end
users, a move that alleviates some of the traffic pressure on the network.
It
supports multiple video formats and can work with WANs (wide-area networks)
that already are in place, Le Litvinoff said in an interview with eWEEK.
Currently, the ECDS virtual offering can only run on a Cisco WAAS, though she
implied support for third-party products may be in the offing.
The
product can support a small number of sites or scale into the thousands, she
said. Its management software also makes for easy deployment, maintenance and
monitoring of video traffic.
Cisco
offers three deployment options for ECDS. The Cisco Media Delivery Engine 1100
and MDE 3100 network appliances can scale to 500 and 5,000 concurrent users,
respectively. In addition, the MDE 50WVB is a virtual blade that supports up to
200 simultaneous users on a Cisco WAAS appliance.
In
addition, Cisco's ECDS supports third-party video applications and a variety of
endpoints, including tablets and mobile phones.
ECDS is available immediately, starting at $4,395.
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