Delivering Video Service Assurance With the IQDialogue Appliance WHITEPAPER Gino Dion Vice President of Strategic Solutions IneoQuest, Inc. Key Partner
Table of Contents Meet the Growing Challenges... 1 Monitor Video Networks with the IQDialogue Appliance... 2 Choose from a Suite of Video Service Assurance Solutions... 3 Manage Video Distribution Services Cost effectively... 3 Powering the Appliance... 4 Reduce Energy and Facility Costs... 6 Consolidate Applications and Save... 6 Feel Safe with Robust Security... 6 Scale to Meet Demand... 7 Track Network Usage... 7 Summary... 8 For More Information... 9 Page ii
Meet the Growing Challenges As digital broadcast technologies continue to evolve, the market for delivery of digital television programming to residential and commercial subscribers is becoming increasingly competitive. Depending on location, a digital TV customer often can choose among a number of service providers and technologies, including cable operators, telecommunications firms with digital subscriber lines (DSL) or passive optical networks, satellite providers, and companies delivering services over wireless broadband, such as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) or WiFi. Many digital video companies are endeavoring to capture incremental business beyond the traditional TV market. These operators are leveraging their infrastructure to offer groundbreaking quality of experience (QoE) and value-add services. As a result, consumers are increasingly abandoning traditional broadcast media and are opting for companies that give them more channels and greater choice in what they view and how they view it. To remain competitive, operators must differentiate their offerings and service quality. Leading providers of digital TV are implementing highly reliable, increased capacity video delivery technologies including Switched Digital Video (SDV), Very High Bitrate DSL (VHDSL), improved video compression, and even installing fibre to the home. They are also offering innovative, new features such as personalized entertainment, interactive applications, high definition (HD) video, video on demand (VOD), voice communications such as Voice over IP (VoIP), and Internet access. Most importantly, they are installing robust video network monitoring and management systems to help achieve the highest possible QoE levels. The intensity of the competition makes it imperative that video providers control operational costs, including customer support and other expenses related to maintaining high quality signal delivery. The key to controlling support costs while maximizing customer satisfaction is to build a video delivery system with superior levels of redundancy and resiliency and then monitor and control every aspect of the system s operation in real time. Such an infrastructure can help service providers reduce the number of preventable issues that drive customer calls, which in turn helps improve satisfaction. Page 1
Monitor Video Networks with the IQDialogue Appliance Achieving high levels of quality and reliability requires tools for testing the network and its components prior to deployment, as well as implementing a true, end-to-end quality and service assurance solution with the capability to monitor, analyze, fault isolate, and troubleshoot the network. The IQDialogue Appliance is a video service monitoring and management probe that listens passively to multiple traffic and signaling control streams providing a real-time look at the health of the video distribution network (Figure 1). Figure 1: A typical video distribution network using the IQDialogue Appliance for service assurance and management The appliance, along with the suite of IQDialogue software packages, is offered by IneoQuest Technologies, Inc., a global provider of advanced quality and service assurance solutions for digital video. Recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in North America by Deloitte LLP three years in a row, and receiving numerous awards for its product innovation, IneoQuest has a rich heritage of developing video test and measurement solutions for both legacy video network delivery and leading-edge offerings like Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and VOD. IneoQuest s IQDialogue Appliance helps operators monitor millions of set-top boxes (STBs) with a powerful, cost-effective, eco-efficient solution in a space-saving, one rack unit (RU) package. The appliance provides superior reliability and reduced operational and environmental overhead compared to the home-grown solutions implemented by some video providers. With exceptional compute, storage, and memory headroom, solutions based on the appliance do not require technology refreshes as frequently as competing systems. As a result, the IQDialogue Appliance helps operators create more scalable management and monitoring solutions at a fraction of the cost of systems from other vendors. Page 2
Choose from a Suite of Video Service Assurance Solutions IneoQuest s IQDialogue software products help video operators maximize operational efficiency while delivering the highest possible QoE to subscribers. By monitoring the performance and control signaling of the video delivery network, IQDialogue solutions provide end-to-end service correlation and capture information about the network s overall health. The IQDialogue service assurance products include: IQDialogue SDV Server Edition a software-based monitoring probe that analyzes, monitors, troubleshoots, and provides audience measurement data for SDV networks IQDialogue Secondary Services Server Edition a robust out-of-band (OOB) and MPEG ancillary data analysis platform that provides detailed analysis of OOB traffic and in-band MPEG metadata IQDialogue MSO VOD an award-winning solution providing end-to-end analysis, logging, and reporting of VOD signaling and transactions for cable deployments IQDialogue Customer Emulation Server Edition a robust IPTV analysis platform providing detailed analysis and emulation of STB and IPTV client activity IQDialogue Mediaroom Platform Manager a real-time probe that analyzes and troubleshoots Microsoft Mediaroom service delivery platforms idms IQDialogue Management System a centralized system manager providing monitoring, auditing, and alarming of IQDialogue deployments Manage Video Distribution Services Cost-effectively The IQDialogue Appliance is a pre-configured package designed to help cable, satellite, and other digital TV providers monitor video delivery services and applications from a single, integrated platform. It offers a true end-to-end solution for OOB monitoring by extracting data on service quality factors such as non-responding STBs, blocking events, alarm conditions, and service group capacity. By listening passively to traffic and signaling control flows, the appliance tracks the state of the video distribution system. Functionally, it is comprised of a front-end application processor, core traffic collector, database engine, and edge traffic controller (Figure 2). Operators are notified of anomalies with a rich set of operational alarms using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps, while a back-end database logs and provides trending information about all types of traffic. The appliance can display dozens of visual representations and reports of the video service s signals and protocols, providing operators with detailed information on the overall health of networks. Page 3
Figure 2: The IQDialogue Appliance is comprised of four major elements Based on the powerful, yet compact, Sun Fire X2270 server from Oracle, the appliance is bundled with a variety of software packages from IneoQuest s IQDialogue product family. The hardware and integrated software packages are certified to work together with built-in management and monitoring software that operates across the whole platform. Powering the Appliance Deploying the right IT resources is vital to the success of video providers service assurance operations. In order to manage and monitor rapidly expanding networks, video providers require systems with the compute power and storage capacity headroom to meet their growing needs, at a price that matches their budgets. The IQDialogue Appliance incorporates a single Sun Fire X2270 server, helping operators gain a competitive advantage with its high performance, low cost, and unmatched energy efficiency. The server s design takes full advantage of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series to offer the best price/performance; exceptionally low space, power, and cooling demands; a simplified management architecture; and the scalability to accommodate future network demands. The server (Figure 3) is factory configured with two Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series (eight cores), 24 GB of main memory, and 1.5 TB of disk storage capacity. Page 4
Figure 3: The IQDialogue Appliance is extremely powerful and scalable, yet remarkably compact As the video distribution network grows and demand on the appliance increases, the system can be upgraded to the latest Intel Xeon processors as they are introduced, as much as 96 GB of main memory can be installed, and up to 4 TB of disk capacity can be supported all integrated in the compact 1 RU form factor helping operators monitor literally millions of STBs simultaneously. Furthermore, by offering more memory capacity and disk drives than similar systems in the same product class, the appliance can provide operators with up to 50% savings on facility real estate and operating expenses. The appliance is pre-loaded with the appropriate IQDialogue application(s) for the type of video distribution system being monitored. The applications are integrated on top of Oracle Solaris 10 with Oracle Solaris Containers virtualization technologies, Oracle Solaris Zettabyte File System (ZFS) file system for built-in storage and volume management, a highly optimized TCP/IP stack, and built-in security features offering video providers enterprise-class performance right out of the box. Oracle Solaris 10 offers the capabilities and features specifically needed by cable and other operators for their service assurance infrastructure. Supported by Oracle and a community of highly experienced users, administrators, and engineers, Oracle Solaris 10 sets the industry standard for performance, efficiency, availability, and security. High availability features, such as Oracle Solaris Predictive Self-Healing, support automatic diagnosis and recovery from hardware and application faults, maximizing system uptime. Oracle Solaris Fault Manager automatically diagnoses, isolates, and recovers the system from many hardware and application faults so that essential system services can continue uninterrupted in the event of software failures, major hardware component failures, and even software misconfiguration problems. IT administrators can quickly zero in on performance issues as well as difficult to find and difficult to recreate bugs using the powerful Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) facility to quickly understand system behavior. Page 5
DTrace can be used to examine application, library, and kernel activity on the IQDialogue Appliance, giving administrators valuable insight into the operation of the system. Reduce Energy and Facility Costs In addition to the need for processing performance in today s video service assurance systems, there is an enormous premium on energy use and space in video distribution datacenters. Consequently, the IT acquisition process is now much more complicated. Many factors other than performance and affordability must be considered. Network operators must worry about power consumption envelopes, cooling systems, and physical footprint in order to minimize energy costs, optimize real estate usage, and reduce the environmental impact of systems. The IQDialogue Appliance helps providers transform datacenters into more eco-friendly environments. Taking full advantage of the compact, 1 RU form factor of the Sun Fire X2270 server, the appliance provides high performance at low cost, and can fit into almost any available rack space in the datacenter. In addition, the unique and highly efficient power and cooling subsystem makes it possible for the IQDialogue Appliance to deliver best-in-class computing power while requiring less energy to run video service assurance applications. Consolidate Applications and Save With the escalating costs of monitoring growing video networks, IT managers are looking for new ways to reduce infrastructure costs and better manage service levels. Consolidating multiple applications onto a single server means changing the way the solutions are deployed. This can be a complicated and expensive process depending on how the applications interact. That's where the sophisticated system virtualization capabilities of the IQDialogue Appliance really shine. Virtualization allows IT staff to run multiple applications on a single server, while maintaining security and isolation, by running one application per virtual server. Organizations can reduce capital equipment and operating expenses by sharing hardware resources without sacrificing application functionality or performance. An integral part of Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Solaris Containers let operators consolidate multiple, IQDialogue applications onto a single appliance each securely in its own environment with application-specific resource allocation and an isolated fault zone. Oracle Solaris Containers isolates applications and services using flexible, software-defined boundaries, and allows many private execution environments to be created within a single instance of the operating system. In addition, IT managers can use the resource management facilities built into the system to shift compute resources among execution environments, helping to rapidly scale capabilities to meet sudden network demand. Feel Safe with Robust Security With the increase of hackers, Trojan horses, and botnets on the Internet, video providers must protect subscriber information from malicious attacks. If the video network management infrastructure is not sufficiently protected, criminals can access massive amounts of private and Page 6
personal information, making it essential to establish a bullet-proof security system. Security as implemented in the IQDialogue Appliance is more than just a collection of technologies. It is the result of Oracle s ongoing commitment to deliver one of the most secure operating systems in the industry. By focusing on security as an integral part of its products, Oracle provides a solid foundation for preventing, not just fixing, security problems. Using Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions a standard part of the appliance operators with vital information protection requirements can take advantage of security features previously only available in highly specialized operating systems. The appliance includes advanced security features, such as Process and User Rights Management, Trusted Extensions for Mandatory Access Control, a Cryptographic Framework, and Secure By Default Networking all of which help providers to safely install video assurance solutions and protect business- and missioncritical data. Scale to Meet Demand With the rapid growth of video distribution networks, it is critical for providers to have a system that can easily scale to meet the expanding demand. Built into the IQDialogue Appliance, the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system is a revolutionary, enterprise-class, general-purpose file system that provides virtually unlimited file system scalability and increased data integrity to large-scale solutions while helping to eliminate storage management complexity. Providing up to 21 billion yottabytes (21 x 10 33 bytes) of capacity, this 128-bit, open source file system integrates traditional file system functionality with built-in volume management techniques. By automatically allocating space from pooled storage when needed, the IQDialogue Appliance simplifies storage management and gives operators the flexibility to optimize data for performance, helping them accurately track real-time incidents such as Switched Digital Video (SDV) blocking events. As video distribution networks grow, the advanced Oracle Solaris ZFS file system helps enable physical storage to be dynamically added to the IQDialogue Appliance without interrupting services providing new levels of flexibility, availability, and performance. Track Network Usage In order to identify and address potential problems before they impact the network, video service assurance solutions must monitor the operation of the video network and store and analyze transaction data. IQDialogue solutions log all desired network transactions to an SQL database for reporting, analysis, and auditing purposes. By using the MySQL database, the world's most popular open source database, the IQDialogue Appliance accomplishes fast analytical performance, high reliability, ease of use, and dramatic cost savings. Due to the flexibility and scalability of the MySQL database, the appliance can easily and cost-effectively accommodate network growth. As a result, operators can utilize the appliance for networks with only a few thousand STBs and easily grow to monitoring massive infrastructures with millions of consumers. Page 7
The MySQL database helps lower the total cost of ownership of the IQDialogue Appliance by reducing database licensing costs and minimizing system downtime. In addition, the reliability and easy maintainability of the appliance and software means that administrators don't waste time troubleshooting performance or downtime issues, but instead can concentrate on making sure the video network is performing properly. Summary As video service delivery continues to evolve, video providers must anticipate and prepare for increasing network and video delivery complexity and significant competitive pressure. Leading cable operators and satellite and Internet video providers are adding innovative services and improving the reliability of digital video networks in order to raise customer satisfaction and control the expenses associated with maintaining underlying infrastructure. Deploying a successful video network requires the implementation of a true end-to-end quality and service assurance solution that supports all facets of a video distribution network. Highperformance video assurance solutions are critical for monitoring, testing, and validating video delivery components and networks used by digital TV providers. Through the use of superior technology from IneoQuest and Oracle, including environmentally friendly, compact packaging, industry-leading file system management and virtualization technology, and popular, open source database systems, IneoQuest s IQDialogue Appliance is an innovative solution that is purpose-built to meet the needs of the most demanding video distribution operator. By leveraging Oracle's experience and leadership in servers, operating system software, and eco-computing, IneoQuest delivers a powerful, yet cost-effective, service assurance solution that meets the requirements of today s industry-leading video providers. Page 8
For More Information Location www.ineoquest.com www.oracle.com/sun Content IQDialogue Appliance and IQDialogue software solutions Oracle Sun hardware and software solutions Page 9
Delivering Video Service Assurance with the IQDialogue Appliance IneoQuest Technologies, Inc. 170 Forbes Boulevard Mansfield, MA 02048 Toll free: 1 866-464-4636 Fax: 508-339-4727