Arista Transforms Media Connectivity
When it comes to Media and Entertainment you will find Arista's goals and culture align with yours
In any IP network based media environment solutions, there must be:
Reliability
Flexibility
Simplicity
Real-time streaming telemetry allows network wide, rich datasets to be easily converted in to timely, actionable information
Quality
In order to deliver best of breed solutions Arista has invested significantly into:
- A Seasoned Media and Entertainment team - With decades of hands-on experience in broadcast manufacturing, content production, and operations , we have worked diligently to educate and involve our technical staff in Media and Entertainment projects and solutions
- Unsurpassed hardware and software technologies - from 400G to CloudVison Portal’s advanced provisioning and visibility, Arista leads the industry to meet the ever evolving demands of broadcasting
- Arista’s Media and Entertainment team has worked vigilantly to build a large Technology Partner ecosystem with solutions that are proven, from creation to consumption
Arista "Knows" File-Based Workflows
- Non-linear editing
- Visual Effects
- Rendering
- Transcoding
- Colour-grading and other finishing workflows
- Localisation
- Archiving
The clear trend is BIG DATA. Visual media is constantly growing in size, whether it’s 4K and 8K content, high frame rate, HDR, 3-D, etc. All of these enhancements of the visual experience create exponential growth in file sizes, and the need for bigger and faster storage.
Storage almost always represents a fan-in of data flows and often includes speed changes (e.g., storage at 10/40/100G, compute nodes at 1/10/25G) and network backbones at 100 or 400G. All of these situations require the network to buffer large amounts of data or packet loss will result. If packets do drop, then TCP responds by closing the window size and performance suffers. In addition, packet loss results in “badput” in the network whereby lost data is retransmitted . And finally, data loss has a huge impact on latency, something that many media workflows cannot tolerate.
Arista also supports a complete range of interface speeds – 1/10/25/40/50/100/400G – along with Quality of Service, large LAG scale and large-scale ECMP. All of which support a network architecture that can scale and handle wire-rate media workloads of the most demanding nature.
Arista's Broadcast/Real-Time Solutions:
As the M&E industry gradually transitions from HD-SDI to IP-based production workflows, Arista IP switches have played a major role in many of the new IP facilities. In this interview, Gerard Phillips discusses what’s new with the company and changes he is seeing around the industry as sports broadcasters shift toward IP-based workflows. He also addresses how 400G circuits could be relevant to this market, the accelerating adoption of ST 2110 across the industry, and what’s next from Arista Networks.
Real-time flows have very different network requirements and professional media has zero tolerance for outages, network latency and interruptions.
Arista is working with industry-leading broadcast equipment manufacturers and broadcast customers to develop the right networking solutions to support this migration to a next-gen infrastructure.
The desire to take advantage of cloud economics and move away from bespoke broadcast systems.
Arista’s Media Control Service
Arista’s Media Control Service provides cognitive orchestration for multicast flows, that is essential to equipping high-bandwidth critical broadcast workflows. With EOS as the foundational architecture, MCS can infuse EOS’s highly available, ultra-low latency, fault-tolerant, and high-performance capabilities into next-gen media workflows. Designed for use as a Network Control Solution, MCS complements the transition from SDI to IP by adding a layer of security, performance, and predictability to real-time on-prem and remote production workflows.
Broadcast controllers can remain topology and bandwidth unaware as MCS abstracts this information and streamlines multicast provisioning by exposing a single simplified integration point. By providing elegant and high-performance APIs, along with the following feature highlights, MCS fast-tracks IP deployments and tangibly reduces capital and operating expenses for broadcasters.
- Instant tally for multicast provisioning requests.
- Real-time streaming telemetry of the network state.
- Protection against over-subscription of links, congestion, and flooding using QoS policies.
- Capability to support diverse network architectures ranging from monolithic to Red/Blue or Purple networks.
- Improve fault tolerance by adding path diversity to multicast flows on multi-spine or purple networks.
- Flexible L2/L3 topology support.
- Instantly detect and represent multicast flows that are affected by network failures.
- Assist in the recovery of network failures on demand.
- High-availability and data redundancy at the network control level.
- Ability to program a larger number of multicast flows than using dynamic protocols.
- Dashboards for MCS Monitoring on CloudVision Portal (CVP) and CloudVision as a Service (CVaaS).
- Integration with Industry-leading broadcast manufacturers
Arista Tackles Streaming Content Demands
This is causing content providers and content networks to re-think network design to handle the massive increase in volume, the need for global points of presence and agile deployment, reduce infrastructure and transit costs, and manage everything more effectively and pro-actively.
Arista has stepped up to provide industry-leading network solutions:
- Wire rate performance from 1/10/25/40/50/100GbE to handle elephant flows and aggregation
- Deep buffers to manage changing traffic patterns and avoid packet loss
- SDN-based traffic steering
- Application of business policy to flow distribution to achieve the lowest possible transit costs
- Programmability at every layer for easy automation
- Agile deployment through automated provisioning
- High density solutions
- Multiple active-active high-availability architectures
- All open standards
- Open APIs at every layer