The Impact of IP, Cloud on Media Workflows

NEW YORK-IP-based media workflow technologies are making way for a fully virtualized operation in which functions can be leveraged on-demand, and files can be considered by their constituent objects, like threads in a scarf that are unraveled and rewoven to suit the season.

We also have a solution that's well-proven over the years, and that's SDI. In that context-what's the problem I have to solve? I don't know, but there's sort of a natural evolution in all things, and certainly in technology, IP is the next step in that evolution, said Jim DeFilippis to media professionals who gathered in New York last month for a one-day event, The Impact of IP & Cloud on Media Workflow. DeFilippis opened the proceedings with a retrospective on that evolution, from tape-centric, linear operations to abstractions of those operations executed in the cloud; from following a tape cart down the hall to conjuring the digital equivalent on a screen. DeFilippis, a Fox alum who now provides expertise to multiple clients, sat in on the first of three panel discussions exploring The Impact of IP & Cloud on Media Workflow. He was joined by Gary Olson, principal of GHO Group, and Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of marketing and scale-out storage solutions for Quantum, which sponsored the event alongside Elemental, IPV, Telestream and CatDV.

MIGRATION TO IP

The discussions covered the status of IP and cloud technologies in terms of development and deployment. On the development side, there are standards and there are polite suggestions, proffered by a variety of groups, Olson said. The combination makes for an alphabet soup of acronyms: AIMS, VSF, ASPEN, NMI, NDI, TICO, TR-03 and -04, RFC 4175, ISO, SMPTE, IEEE, IETF, AMWA, JT-NM, EBU, etc. Most of the groups are inter-related and much of the work is ongoing.

What are we trying to solve with all these standards? The maturity is going from your Best Buy router to a more sophisticated network, he said.

Meanwhile, the ongoing development of multiple standards has folks waiting to purchase equipment. Panelists noted that the SDI-to-IP migration is a work in progress. Whereas the cost of SDI once was born by the entire industry, research and development funds are now going increasingly into IP, thus a shift is expected to follow.

Stedman noted that internet technology is in a continual state of development, and to use IP technologies when you have a problem that it solves. What you can do in a server-based environment versus a proprietary environment is different, Olson said.

You can have a traffic system that lives in a virtual machine, say, instead of having seven servers, you can have one server with seven slices. Right now, a managed switch has all the brains in the switch, and it has to be replicated across the fabric. With a software-defined network, you define it once and it replicates across the environment, he said.

The discussion touched on the single-switch architecture reflective of the SDI environment, and how that concept may need to evolve in the IP world, where the last trouble-shooting step is the reboot. One attendee noted that his operation has bifurcated the network because of the number of functions that have to be performed. Stedman noted that in cases where a single switch is used, it has to be designed for peak load.

METADATA & HYBRID WORKFLOWS

During the second session of the day, TV Technology Executive Editor Deborah McAdams (R) moderated the Changes in Media Management in a Hybrid Workflow Environment panel with (L to R) James Varndell, technical product manager for IPV, Ryan Servant, vice president of North American business development for CatDV and James Snyder, senior systems administrator at the Library of Congress.

LINK:	http://www.tvtechnology.com/resources/0006/the-impact-of-ip-cloud-on-m...
	See more stories from tvtechnology

Most recent headlines