Cloud Based Infrastructure for Next Generation TV

Transcription

1 Cloud Based Infrastructure for Next Generation TV Technical Briefing - Video Storage and Processing Platform Rev A

2 Copyright Ericsson AB All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright owner. Disclaimer The contents of this document are subject to revision without notice due to continued progress in methodology, design, and manufacturing. Ericsson shall have no liability for any error or damage of any kind resulting from the use of this document. Trademark List All trademarks are properties of their respective owners. A list of trademarks is found in document Trademark Information, CSH Rev A (17)

3 1 Executive Summary The features and experiences that subscribers demand today TV Anywhere, HD recordings, huge libraries require operators to quickly and efficiently deploy complex time and place shifted TV services. Traditional architectures are costly, time consuming, and not very scalable or resilient. Challenges include huge storage needs and costs, complex infrastructure and very high performance throughput. 2 The Challenges TV service providers are struggling to achieve or maintain their competitive advantage with a few key next generation services such as time shifted TV, Video on Demand (VOD) and cloud based DVR (cdvr). While each is slightly different, the challenges for all of them are quite similar. Putting an integrated infrastructure in place With the shift towards TV everywhere, service providers need to understand how they can have an integrated multi-platform VOD strategy covering services to both legacy set-top boxes (STBs) as well as Over-the-Top (OTT). They are expanding beyond the tradition TV platform into mobile devices, gaming platforms like Xbox and even dongles such as Chromecast and Sony s SmartStick. Their legacy backends often need to be updated to keep pace with new Content Management Systems, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) and encoding schemes. Keeping up with the OTTs While time shifting is gaining popularity, on demand Pay TV content still only makes up a tiny portion of over all TV viewing, with 23% of viewers ordering only 1-3 VOD rentals each month. Instead subscribers more often watch VOD content from OTT services like Netflix who are constantly expanding their ondemand libraries. TV service providers must also expand their libraries to keep up. This adds content library scaling to the list of challenges. Consistently awesome experiences across all screens Subscribers are interested in browsing and watching time shifted TV on a STB or any connected device. This includes restarting a live program from the beginning, navigating backward on the program guide to discover and watch content that was broadcast earlier, or pausing live TV without a DVR. A multiscreen solution must be put in place to handle this. If this viewing experience on other devices is as a good as viewing on the primary TV screen, screen size aside, subscribers will be more compelled to use multiscreen services. In addition to on-demand or recorded programs, as these new time shifted options gain in popularity and migrate to other devices, Rev A (17)

4 it will demand improvements in the quality of video processing, packaging and distribution processes as well. Leveraging the Cloud Finally, traditional DVR s are slowly migrating to the cloud as well in order to bring recorded programing everywhere on all devices. This answers the ongoing subscriber demands, while providing a technological competitive advantage. CDVR eliminates storage needs in home set top boxes, reducing cost for hardware, maintenance, and upgrades by reducing truck rolls. The number of concurrent recordings and the amount of storage per subscriber can be set on the fly. While deployment options vary regionally, they all face scaling, storage, performance, and reliability challenges. Storage Storage is a multifaceted concern with time shifted and place shifted TV. As recording archives, VOD libraries, number of channels and time shift buffers increase; providers must be prepared to scale up quickly and efficiently. Sizing systems is difficult given the number of variables, including the unpredictable nature of some cdvr content. In some situations, service providers are responding by migrating from a traditional VOD infrastructure to CDN architecture. A CDN architecture enables more dynamic content caching schemes and leverages modern Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) delivery protocols for end-to-end multi-screen IP delivery. This allows providers to expand their library and adaptively stream content to IP-enabled set top boxes, and mobile devices, as well as legacy systems. The deployment flexibility created by a CDN approach also permits a scale-out rollout into new markets as needed. Beyond the basic scaling of content, a provider must also consider how protecting these files might impact the scale of storage. In some situations deduplication is a possibility and in others it is impossible due to copyright laws. This overhead could greatly enlarge an already huge content library. Figure 1: Video traffic in a triple-play network during busy hours Rev A (17)

5 Throughput Performance Video traffic during peak hours is growing i, and the shift from multicast linear TV to unicast VOD and cdvr content will create significant performance challenges. Unicast requires a separate stream for every user, even if they are streaming the same content. This is unlike multicast delivery, which reaches hundreds of home with a single video stream. CDN World notes that 75% of customers who receive poor quality IPTV service will either not return or will seek out a different provider. ii In order to maintain an acceptable quality of service, there must be sustained high performance during read and write. Particularly with cdvr, this helps compensate for the potential 30-40% recording concurrency at peak times, like prime time, or during popular programs. Playout concurrency is also much higher than typical VOD applications with cdvr typically spreading over a 72 hours window after the recordings. Massive throughput is required due to the number of potential parallel recordings 3 The Solution 3.1 Ericsson Video and Storage Processing Platform The Ericsson Video and Storage Processing Platform offers a unique, proven infrastructure, which allows for seamless augmentation and replacement of legacy TV services with new cloud-based services. It integrates and virtualizes the storage and processing capabilities of as many Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) servers as needed, providing outstanding performance gains and allowing operators to avoid many of the complexities and costs associated with launching new services. Optimized for media, it s ideal for time-shifted services. Rev A (17)

6 Tremendously versatile, the platform enables multiple uses cases such as: Master Video Library Long tail server Scalable Origin server CDN Assist Enhanced VOD Cloud DVR These new generation of video services are all primed to utilize the latest technology advances in cloud computing and storage using IT infrastructure private or public clouds. Among the main advantages of utilizing such cloud architecture for video service providers is the abstraction of the services tier from the underpinning specialized video tier and generic IT infrastructure (Compute/Storage/Networking) tier. The platform provides a software solution that aggregates standard COTS servers into a massive grid of joint storage and compute known as the cluster. The Ericsson Video and Storage Processing Platform cluster provides a unified name-space for storage and a single pool of compute resources on the same cluster using leading virtualization stacks. The ability of the platform to turn standard servers into a joint store and compute grid leads to unprecedented density in cloud data centers, avoiding the usual bottlenecks between storage and compute clusters through data locality, and facilitates scaling and management through a unified grid management. The platform contains two main software layers in order to create a video private cloud using the converged storage/compute cloud architecture. Rev A (17)

7 3.2 Basic Architecture The platform is comprised of servers (nodes) of multiple Data Attached Storage (DAS) or Just a Bunch of Disks (JBODs) each running our software. The foundation of the nodes is the storage. These nodes are clustered together to form a pod, which in turn make up the grid. The software-based, distributed file system is a true scale-out system. The dynamically allocated read and write resources have no limit and provide very high throughput. It also runs on any hardware, or combination of hardware. This allows you to pick the right server configuration for the specific workload you have, and removes shackles to any particular legacy hardware as you upgrade. The grid management suite provides management, dynamic resource balancing, and allocation within the scale-out storage and compute platform. Proper server management software will guarantee the security and stability of servers throughout its lifespan. The manager performs resource management and balancing for the grid and acts as external interface to service providers back office systems (Business management, Content management, Resource management, etc.). It orchestrates and controls multiple server pods, with a massive number of servers, within any number of flexible pod configurations. The manager dynamically controls, in a real-time environment, the pod and node load balancing in terms of storage capacity, processing capabilities, ingest and streaming requirements. In addition to managing the server pods, the manager communicates with the back office infrastructure using multiple interfaces. These interfaces help the manager to control content acquisition, session allocation, recording scheduling, ad-insertion capabilities, key management, and other functions. The nodes each have processing capabilities combined with storage devices and are responsible for both storing and delivering data, the distributed file system, and all storage related functions. When grouped together they form a powerful pod, the basic logical block of the system. A pod represents a virtual video server entity, which clusters together a number of nodes interconnected within a LAN topology via the standard 1 GigE management and 10 GigE full mesh interconnection networks. Rev A (17)

8 Each node can join live multicast streams for recording/ingest, stream all popular formats, and support streaming legacy, current, and emerging protocols. 3.3 Functionality Media Recording and Ingest The Ericsson Video Storage and Processing Platform provides scalable realtime content ingest functionality for: VOD ingest Live channel ingest in the form of raw MPEG2-TS feeds The Live media ingest connection is established using an IP multicast streaming approach, when each channel encoder is connected to the platform via a different IP multicast connection. The entire video ingest workflow is triggered and managed by the Manager application. In the initial stage, the Manager allocates the nodes to perform the actual ingest, assigns a session and coordinates the communication parameters with the required source. The following media ingest types are supported: Constant Bit Rate (CBR) ingest - Each CBR live channel or VOD file is represented as a Single-Program Transport Stream (SPTS). The CBR content is used for legacy streaming. Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) ingest - The ABR content for live channel or VOD file is represented by multiple SPTS, one for each video layer with a different bitrate. The ABR content targets OTT streaming purposes. During the ingest process the following on the fly procedures occur: Video analyzing and creation of index file per each ingested SPTS Single index file for CBR and multiple index files for ABR (per each video layer) are created Performing Video and TS level integrity check and errors detection Detection of SCTE-35 markers for seamless Ad-insertion and splicing purposes As a final point in the ingest process the content is segmented to small chunks (~1MB) and dispersed across the entire cluster to provide better storage capacity and ensure the highest reliability level and most advanced content redundancy scheme. It is striped across multiple drives and nodes in the pod. This ensures both high levels of available parallel IO and also perfect IO load balancing across the entire storage cluster. The platform also implements a unique scale-out, distributed file-system, which uses much less overhead for data protection. Instead of replicating or even triplicating the data chunks, Ericsson uses a distributed data protection scheme using either XOR parity chunks for RAID5 like use cases and erasure codes for RAID6+ use cases. This ensures both better capacity efficiency as well as read-write efficiency, which is paramount for video application specifically on a large scale. Rev A (17)

9 3.3.2 Distributed File system A key component of the software offering is a virtualized software-defined storage (SDS), which resides in the infrastructure layer and includes a distributed storage solution. The SDS aggregates local storage resources available on servers and virtualizes them into a shared, policy driven, virtual storage pool. This storage pool offers high IO performance, data durability and high availability using advanced distributed data dispersion algorithms in addition with a seamless fault tolerance and self-healing operations. The SDS software stack provides: Aggregated IO performance from all sources (linear scalability) Distributed data protection model (distributed RAID) Fault-tolerance and high availability on the storage infrastructure layer On-the-fly provisioning of new storage resources Self-healing capabilities, including: Restripe - Rewrites files with new permutation, when scaling the storage cluster with a new server and drives Rebuild - Recreates the files from failed drives Balance - Reconstructs decommissioned disk after it was replaced. Repair - Fixes holes/corrupted data chunks of a striped file Data Resiliency - Reconstructs missing segments of the requested data according to the implemented RAID algorithm Video Streaming The Ericsson Video Storage and Processing Platform supports two main types for content delivery and streaming: CBR streaming used by legacy systems in the Cable world (IPTV/QAM STB s). ABR streaming OTT (Wi Fi, 3G, 4G) for the subscribers companion devices (PC, ios, Android ant) The main difference of the ABR streaming technique from the legacy CBR is in the client device capabilities. In the ABR streaming, the video player has full control on the streaming rate and dynamically adapts to any changes in the streaming conditions. These devices are continuously detecting the access bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of a video stream accordingly by switching between different video profiles depending on available resources. This approach promises a small video buffering, fast start time and a very good overall user experience of ABR video streaming for both high-end and low-end network connections Sliding Time Shift Buffer In addition to the regular cloud DVR services, operators may opt to provide advanced features such as Catch-Up TV library, Start Over, Record in the Past, and additional features. These are operator-driven automatic recording features. Rev A (17)

10 With a sliding time shift buffer, all live broadcast channels in the line-up are automatically recorded, stored and made available for all subscribers for these time shifted Services during a predefined time-based sliding window called Time Shift Buffer (TSB). The TSB can be managed either with Electronic Program Guide (EPG) awareness or without it using the time segment approach. For the EPG aware TSB, the external content management system will request to record and store the entire channel lineup for defined number of hours/days, which will create the linear circular TSB on any desired time window size. Using this mode the deletion of the content is managed by the content management system. In the case of time segment approach, the manager will maintain a linear TSB using a time shift buffer implementation, where the stored data in the time shift buffer represents a sliding window of time with fixed sized recorded segments. This window can be configured on a per channel basis and the system will keep adding data to the head of the buffer and removing old data from the tail of the buffer Diagnostics Suite Given the complexity of this infrastructure, we provide a centralized, multifunctional suite for monitoring and diagnosing the entire platform in the production environments. It proactively collects and extracts data to diagnose errors and identify failures. It enables deep system-level and service-level analytics of the system by maintaining constant monitoring, control, and inspection. By conducting deep level diagnostics it keeps operational staff constantly updated and informed of the system's health and performance, and assists in conducting a deep business level analysis to recognize market trends using comprehensive reporting tools. On the functional plane, the diagnostics suite offers the following monitoring, diagnostics and analytics capabilities, and interfaces: Real-time monitoring and alerting on system health metrics and service performance KPI s Dashboards - visualization (graphs) of system health and performance over time Offline reports system and service level performance monitoring and business level analysis Rev A (17)

11 3.4 Use Cases Cloud DVR The Cloud DVR (cdvr) application enables TV service providers to offer a DVR service without the need to deploy storage at the subscriber site. By moving the storage and recording upstream to the network operation center, or even a public cloud, and running a cdvr client software at the subscriber site, operators can offer a full DVR service without the need to upgrade subscriber hardware. There are multiple deployment options, including private copy, shared copy, and a mix of the two Private Copy In for private copy, a dedicated recording copy is created and stored each unique subscriber. This means that even if multiple subscribers request to record the same program, each and every subscriber will have a separate stored recording. Generally, these deployments create a large impact on the storage capacity of the cluster, since the recorded content is unique per subscriber, requiring significantly more storage capacity. In addition, due to the unchangeable nature of the individual content, the streaming throughput and bandwidth consumption requirements of the cluster increase as the number of subscribers grow and require more recording and streaming concurrency usage patterns. Rev A (17)

12 Shared Copy The main differentiator to private copy deployment is that the shared-copy scheme assumes a single/shared copy of each recording, which serves all subscribers that requested to record the same program. All subscribers that request to record the same program are assigned with a reference and share the same physical recorded asset. This method can be referred to as a many-to-one relationship and is known as a shared-copy. The main advantage of this method is high capacity efficiency, due to significantly lower footprint on the storage capacity than the private-copy mode. In addition, the cacheable nature of the shared-copy content allows the deployments to leverage the CDN distributed approach and caching capabilities. This significantly reduces the impact on the centralized cluster in terms of streaming requirements while providing high throughput streaming of the most popular cached content in a low latency from a close proximity to the subscribers Enhanced VOD Although available for over a decade, VOD usage has just begun to gain momentum in the last few years. Having overcome the clunky interfaces and initial monetization concerns, set-top box VOD availability has almost doubled since Accommodating this exponential growth requires service providers to rapidly expand their VOD solutions. This creates challenges. In addition to the ongoing licensing issues, there are infrastructure concerns that arise as you expand. Current solutions tend to fall short in the three key capabilities needed to deliver the video content people want, where and when it s wanted. These factors performance, flexibility, and scale are all addressed with the Ericsson suite of enhanced VOD offerings CDN Assist Service providers that chose to migrate from a traditional VOD infrastructure to a CDN architecture gain more dynamic content caching schemes and leverage modern Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) delivery protocols for end-to-end multi-screen IP delivery. Ericsson provides a unified CDN assist solution allowing MSOs to expand their library and adaptively stream content to IPenabled set top boxes, and mobile devices, as well as legacy systems. Benefits include: Unified delivery infrastructure: CDN delivers all content to all devices Streaming to legacy set tops from the CDN Backwards compatibility: No changes required on the legacy set tops Support of leading session management and UDP streaming/stream control protocols Rev A (17)

13 Dynamic Origin Server The dynamic origin server includes high performance scale-out storage with an integrated media framework that allows the storage nodes to perform live ingest, processing, and delivery. Processing is performed on the storage servers eliminating the need for external server farms and decreasing networking complexity. Providers can add servers as needed, leverage the hardware agnostic benefit of the platform, and simplify the infrastructure even at a very large scale. Media Workflow Framework Components: Ingest processor Parallel transcoding engine Ad insertion Content delivery engine Rev A (17)

14 3.4.3 Master Video Library (MVL) The MVL is scale out storage providing the ability to ingest, process and ubiquitously stream master or gold copies of licensed content. The MVL is the logical component that can run on the same or separated infrastructure with the VSPP Origin. The MVL is deployed as a scale-out NAS, providing the ability to interface to different content providers and fetch the content as well as providing the associated content processing workflow. The content is acquired into the MVL using the TCP acceleration protocols (e.g. FTP, CIFS). The fetched content can be optionally transcoded, pre-packaged and preencrypted Long Tail Server Consumers are constantly demanding deeper video offerings. As the demand for content becomes more diversified, the classic caching model with small libraries and high stream count does not apply. As video service providers deploy large storage vaults it becomes cost prohibitive to cache the entire library at the network edge. The Long Tail Server allows operators to store and deliver less popular, or long tail, content directly from a large, central storage vault, eliminating the need to replicate entire libraries at the edge of the network. Rev A (17)

15 3.5 Key Benefits Time shifted TV is often a complex deployment. Every deployment is unique with its own challenges and characteristics. At Ericsson, we make these solutions simpler. The platform offers greater flexibility and can scale-out to support hundreds of petabytes of video storage as well as massive amounts of concurrent recordings and playouts. This disruptive technology is not only cost efficient, secure, field proven and flexible but its performance is unmatched Simplification In order to truly simplify time shifted-tv architecture, we ve eliminated the individual processing server farms and integrated the storage and the processing into a single namespace. This reduces interconnect complexities, and is much simpler to manage. All of this greatly improves performance. The integrated media workflow framework includes Media Ingest / Recording Media transcoding Ad insertion Packaging Encryption Media delivery (streaming) Flexibility In addition to fully heterogeneous support of any mix of x86 generic servers, the platform easily integrates into back office systems. Service providers get the freedom to configure the hardware to match their workload, with no vendor lock in. It supports most Digital Rights Management (DRM), Content Management Systems (CMS), and Session Resource Management (SRM) applications. Each server in the cluster can: Perform encryption Support stream control (legacy STBs LSCP, RTSP) Stream video (all popular formats supported - UDP, ABR etc.) Provide Just in time Packaging Scalability For all next generation TV applications, scalability and capacity efficiency is critical. This performance cannot be affordably achieved using common storage and streaming server architectures. At scale, it would create a very complex and expensive infrastructure. The Ericsson platform scales linearly: Plug and play expansion Single namespace simplicity Increases simultaneous streaming capacity with innovative video striping Rev A (17)

16 Cost Effective at Massive Scale The Ericsson Video Storage and Performance Platform leverages several elements to enable a cost effective deployment of time-shifted TV services. First, the platform is hardware agnostic. Operators are free to choose their own generic x86 servers, even changing brands along the way, and can be confident that Ericsson will provide heterogeneous support. This eliminates the need for expensive appliances or vendor lock-in. Second, by integrating compute and storage into the same stack, packaging, transcoding, streaming, and ad insertion are all integrated. In fact, the stack is optimized for media workflow. There is no need for silos or a dedicated stack for streaming, one for encoding, etc. This dramatically reduces the server requirements and in turn OPEX. The platform reduces server needs by 40% compared to a classic configuration as processing and storage are integrated, which eliminates all the extra server farms. Most importantly, you can recoup the cost for the storage and recording infrastructure within 10 months. In general, a standard subscription fee can cover the hardware and software costs Peak Performance Always The characteristics and nuances of video have been carefully considered. For both read and write, we sustain very high recording and playout concurrency. This helps compensate for the potential 30-40% recording concurrency at peak times, like prime time, or during popular programs. Playout concurrency in cdvr is also much higher than typical VOD applications typically spread over a 72 hours window after the recordings Solid Reliability The high availability and resiliency of the product greatly benefits advanced TV services. Content is striped across the entire cluster with Cross-Server RAID parity at the application level. This makes the system resilient against both disk AND server failure and allows for service continuity during maintenance. It is a tremendously durable solution. Put simply, the videos recorded will always be available, always, and immediately. We also provide high quality of service with very low latency ensuring the viewer will get instant reaction to all requests (stop, play, and pause) with a good quality stream. The platform is built for continuous operations: Redundancy without duplication requirements Hands-off maintenance Auto recovery, fast rebuild 100% resilience No downtime for updates, h/w replacement Distributed RAID Comprehensive diagnostics suite Rev A (17)

17 4 Conclusion 4.1 Why Ericsson The Ericsson Video and Storage Platform powers over 60% of the cloud DVR systems deployed today, including over two years running in a private copy per user cdvr commercial deployment. Our solution places us at the forefront of technology capability and performance, with proven deployments at the most demanding customers totaling over 150 petabytes of storage capacity. 5 Contact Ericsson To understand more about how Ericsson s Video Storage and Processing Platform, the Cloud DVR Solution and its broader portfolio can help you meet your subscribers demands and differentiate your offerings, contact your local Ericsson office. i Source: Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs 2012 ii Source: CDN World Forum, London 2012 Rev A (17)