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Showing posts with label Video Networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video Networking. Show all posts

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Voice and Video Collaboration Services in the Cloud

By Stefan Karapetkov Video Networker

Cloud computing is defined as ‘virtualization of computing assets delivered on demand over the IP network’. It promises availability and scalability for applications ranging from storage to collaboration. Clouds are in particularly popular because the concept is easier to grasp than previous attempts to define similar services through Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

The Cloud is a more general concept that includes not only SaaS but also storage, platform, and infrastructure as a service. Clouds are in better position to deliver on the promise for interactivity. While slow networks in the past have made the user experience with ASPs quite negative, better networks available today allow for fast response times, and increased interactivity.

Analysts are excited about cloud services and see above-average growth; while the average IT market growth is expected to be 4% per year until 2013, IT cloud services are expected to grow 25% over same period. The current bidding war between HP and Dell for cloud storage technology provider 3PAR is a great example for how hot this market segment has become.

Evolution of Service Architectures

In the legacy approach, each enterprise application runs on separate server(s) that resides in one of the enterprise’s offices. This leads to inefficient use of space, energy (power-up and cooling), and substandard user experience. In the next stage of the evolution, all servers were collocated in a data center where they can share space and power. In the third stage, services are provided by the Cloud that can be within the enterprise (‘private cloud’) or outside the enterprise (‘public cloud’).

The term ‘virtualization’ is often used in relation to Clouds, and it is important to clarify virtualization’s role. Virtualization saves money by increasing server utilization, i.e. reducing the number of servers (hardware) necessary to support applications. Virtualization can be used in a traditional data center or in the Cloud. In both environments, virtualization reduces the hardware necessary to run enterprise applications. It has very strong positive financial and environmental impact.

Unified Collaboration

Unified collaboration combines variety of communication tolls – voice, video, email, presence, IM, etc. – into a seamless user experience, and into workflows, through a single user interface. Since UC installations are far past pilot deployments and are now being rolled out across large organizations, scalability is an important requirement.

Global teams span the entire world, and different time zones do not allow everyone on the team to participate live in all collaboration sessions. Audio, video, and shared content must therefore be stored and streamed. This leads to the requirement for efficient and scalable storage.

Accessibility of UC applications has two sides. First, users should be able to access them from anywhere, not just the office bit also from remote locations. Second, any device should provide access, including computers, telephones, appliances such as personal and group video systems, and even immersive telepresence systems.

To meet these UC requirements, UC architectures must follow IT architectures towards Clouds.

Bandwidth Requirements

UC applications, such as voice and video, require higher quality of service (QOS) than applications such as email, scheduling, or management. QOS are defined by bandwidth, latency, packet loss, and jitter. And while there are mechanisms in place to combat packet loss and jitter, bandwidth remains the most important resource necessary to support voice and video collaboration applications.

If multiple systems have to be connected in a multi-point conference, the traffic quickly grows, and may overwhelm the Cloud. Cloud throughput is critical for successful deployment of voice and video collaboration application. Recent advances in video compression technology, in particular Polycom’s implementation of the H.264 High Profile for real-time video, allow for ‘thinner’ connections between premise and Cloud without sacrificing the quality of experience.

In general, voice transmission requires less bandwidth than video. Even the highest audio quality does not require more than 128 kbps per channel and this is usually not an issue for the interface between customer premise and the cloud service provider.

Security Requirements

Numerous surveys of CIOs and IT administrators have shown that security is the leading concern around deploying Cloud services. With data applications, hackers try to capture and copy the customer data. With real-time collaboration applications, such as voice and video, hackers try to redirect and record voice and video calls.

There is currently a fairly robust security framework for user authentication, authorization, and media encryption – both in SIP and H.323 environments - that can be deployed to prevent interception of voice and video calls at the interface between customer and SP. However, this security framework has to be reevaluated and extended to cover new security threats that come with new cloud service use cases.

Many industry experts believe that cloud services will lead to improved security due to the centralization of data and the increased security-focused resource. SPs are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford to solve themselves.

Availability Requirements

In the cloud services scenario, a lot of the infrastructure functionality that today resides on customer premise will be moved to the Cloud, and become a shared resource among enterprises. The availability of these resources is of paramount importance to the success of voice and video services in the Cloud.

One successfully deployed approach to increased availability (and scale) is the use of a redundant resource management application that controls a pool of multipoint conferencing resources in the network.

To make a pool of conference servers behave as one huge conference server, the resource management application tracks incoming calls, routes them to the appropriate resource (for instance, this can be done based on available server resources but also based on available bandwidth to the location of this server) and that automatically creates cascading links if a conference overflows to another server. If the conference is prescheduled, the application server can select a conference server that has sufficient resources to handle the number of participants at the required video quality (bandwidth). Overflow situations are probable with ad-hoc conferences where participants spontaneously join without any upfront reservation of resources.

The resource management application runs on two servers to ensure 100% redundancy and auto-failover. It is designed to provide uninterrupted service by routing calls around failed or busy conference servers. It also allows administrators to “busy out” media severs for maintenance activities while still providing an ‘always available’ experience from the Cloud user point of view. The system can gradually grow from small deployments of 1-2 conference servers to large deployments with many geographically dispersed conference servers based on the dynamic needs of growing organizations. System administrators can monitor daily usage and plan the expansion as necessary. This approach also provides a centralized mechanism to deploy a front-end application to control and monitor conferencing activities across all conference servers.

The resource management application also serves as a load balancer in this scenario, that is, it distributes the conference load over a group of servers, ensuring that a server is not oversubscribed, while another being underutilized. The larger the resource pool, the more efficient the load balancing function is, a feature that is very important to Cloud service providers who can offer conference services globally by using the resource management application and placing conference servers in central points of their networks. More approaches to increased availability and scale are discussed in the paper ‘Polycom UC Intelligent Core: Scalable Infrastructure for Distributed Video’.

Bringing Collaboration and Clouds Closer

The trend towards cloud services is driving both technology and business model changes.

On the technology side, UC technology providers have to make significant changes in the architecture for voice and video applications to better align with the architecture of Clouds. Reducing the complexity in the infrastructure and pushing it to the endpoints is a viable approach although the impact on the user experience through complex endpoint implementation is still being evaluated.

Cloud service providers have to meet challenges on their own. Clouds today are designed with data processing in mind, and throughput (bandwidth to and from the Cloud) and Quality of Service (latency, for example) are not at the level required for real-time interaction. Cloud providers therefore will need to increase throughput for real-time applications, and develop new service pricing to accommodate the specifics of real-time collaboration.
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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Annual Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast Projects Global IP Traffic to Increase More Than Fourfold by 2014

Video to Surpass Peer-to-Peer as Top Internet Traffic Contributor by End of 2010, Global Online Video Community to Exceed 1 Billion Users by 2014


SAN JOSE, Calif. - June 2, 2010 - Today Cisco announced the results of the annual Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast, 2009-2014, which projects that global Internet traffic will increase more than fourfold to 767 exabytes, or more than 3/4 of a Zettabyte, by 2014. This amount is 100 exabytes higher than the projected level in 2013, or an increase the equivalent of 10 times all the traffic traversing Internet Protocol networks in 2008.

The growth in traffic will continue to be dominated by video, exceeding 91 percent of global consumer IP traffic by 2014. Improvements in network bandwidth capacity and Internet speeds, along with the increasing popularity of HDTV and 3DTV are key factors expecting to quadruple IP traffic from 2009 to 2014.

Overview:

  • The Cisco VNI Forecast, which focuses on two primary user groups—consumers and businesses—was developed as an annual study to estimate global IP traffic growth and trends. Projections are based on Cisco analysis and modeling of traffic, usage, and device data from independent analyst sources. Cisco validates its forecast, inputs, and methodology with data provided by service providers worldwide.
  • To help network users better understand global IP traffic growth drivers and trends, Cisco updated several of its unique resources:
    • The VNI Forecast widget provides customized views of the growth of various network traffic types around the globe (revised for this 2009 - 2014 forecast period).
    • The VNI PC Pulse application for desktop and laptop computers helps consumers learn more about their individual impact on IP networks and compare their network usage with that of others around the world.

Research Highlights:

Total Global IP Traffic in "Bytes"

  • Global IP traffic is expected to increase more than fourfold (4.3 times) from 2009 to 2014, reaching 63.9 exabytes per month in 2014, up from approximately 56 exabytes per month in 2013. This is equivalent to 766.8 exabytes per year - almost three-quarters of a zettabyte, by 2014.
  • The nearly 64 exabytes of global IP traffic per month projected for 2014 is equivalent to 16 billion DVDs; 21 trillion MP3's; or 399 quadrillion text messages.

Regional IP Traffic Trends

  • By 2014, the highest IP-traffic generating regions will be North America (19.0 exabytes per month), Asia Pacific (17.4 exabytes per month), Western Europe (16.2 exabytes per month) and Japan (4.3 exabytes per month).
  • The fastest growing IP-traffic regions for the forecast period (2009-2014) are Latin America (51 percent compound annual growth rate [CAGR], 7.9-fold growth), the Middle East and Africa (45 percent CAGR, 6.5-fold growth), and Central Europe (38 percent CAGR, 5.1-fold growth).

Primary Growth Driver: Video

  • By 2014, the sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet video, and peer-to-peer) will continue to exceed 91 percent of global consumer traffic.
  • Global Internet video traffic will surpass global peer-to-peer traffic by the end of 2010. For the first time in the last 10 years, peer-to-peer traffic will not be the largest Internet traffic type.
  • The global online video community will include more than 1 billion users by the end of 2010.
  • By 2014, it would take more than two years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second; to watch all the video crossing the network that year would take 72 million years.

3DTV and HD (Advanced Video)

  • Globally, advanced video traffic, including three-dimensional (3-D) and high-definition TV (HDTV), is projected to increase 13 times between 2009 and 2014.
  • By 2014, 3-D is expected to account for 4 percent of total Internet video traffic.
  • By 2014, 3-D and HD video is forecast to comprise 42 percent of total consumer Internet video traffic.

Global File Sharing

  • Global file sharing traffic is projected to reach 11 exabytes per month in 2014, 22 percent CAGR from 2009-2014.
  • P2P will grow at a CAGR of 16 percent, while web-based and other file sharing will grow at CAGR of 47 percent from 2009-2014.
  • By 2014, global P2P traffic will be 17 percent of global consumer Internet traffic, down from 36 percent in 2009.

Global Business IP Traffic

  • Global business IP Traffic is forecast to reach 7.7 exabytes per month in 2014, more than tripling from 2009-2014.
  • Business video conferencing is projected grow ten-fold over the forecast period, growing almost three times as fast as overall business IP traffic, at a CAGR of 57 percent from 2009-2014.
  • Web-based video conferencing is the fastest growing sub-category, growing 180-fold from 2009-2014 (183 percent CAGR from 2009-2014).

Mobile Broadband

  • Global mobile data traffic will increase 39 times from 2009 to 2014.
  • By 2014, annual global mobile data traffic will reach 3.5 exabytes per month (or a run rate of more than 42 exabytes annually).

Consumer vs. Business

  • Consumer IP traffic is projected to grow faster than business:
    • For 2009, consumer IP traffic represented 79 percent of monthly total global IP traffic and business IP traffic was 21 percent of monthly total global IP traffic.
    • By 2014, consumer IP traffic (web surfing, instant messaging, user-generated videos, etc.) will represent 87 percent of monthly total global IP traffic; while business IP traffic (email, voice, Internet, HD and web-based video conferencing, etc.) will represent 13 percent of monthly total global IP traffic.

Network Speed Enables IP Traffic Growth: 2000 vs. 2010 Comparison

  • In just a decade, the average global residential Internet connection download speed has increased 35 times, which has helped to dramatically increase Internet usage.
  • In 2000, the average global residential Internet connection download speed was 127 kilobits per second (Kbps). The current (2010) average global residential Internet connection download speed is 4.4 megabits per second (Mbps.)

Network Download Evolution:

Online Activity

2000 Download Time

2010 Download Time

Download a DVD-quality movie (4 GB)

3 days

2 hours

Download a MP3 audio file (3 MB)

3 minutes

5 seconds

Download an email attachment (1 MB)

1 minute

2 seconds

Cisco VNI Forecast Widget:

Media/Analysts/Bloggers: Use Cisco's interactive VNI Forecast widget to create custom forecast charts and views by region, application and end-user segment. Get the VNI Forecast Widget.

Enhanced Consumer Application:

Cisco VNI PC Pulse Application:
The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) PC Pulse application measures the amount and types of traffic that you generate from your PC (for example, Web browsing, video, e-mail, etc.). The application also provides a new "IP DNA" abstract image that represents your personal usage preferences. You can compare your individual data against aggregate global statistics from other Cisco VNI PC Pulse users around the world to see how you rate.
Get Cisco PC Pulse

Supporting Quote:

  • Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Group, Cisco

    • "Service providers are faced with evolving bandwidth and scalability requirements as residential, business and mobile consumers continue to demonstrate a healthy appetite for advanced video services across a variety of networks and devices. IP networks must be intelligent and flexible enough to support this tremendous variety of traffic growth. The Cisco VNI Forecast offers a global snapshot of video's significance in our daily lives and signals the need for further network preparations to support the quadrupling of the Internet and the more than 1 billion online video users by 2014."

Supporting Resources:

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