Our CEO David Trossell speaks to ITProPortal about network transformation required to manage large amounts of video data that will be transferred over 5G.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2018
How to manage the impact of 5G on video
An International media company wants to consolidate its video editing operations in New York and London. This will split their video data between their offices in the two cities. In London 60TB will be stored there, and the same amount of data will be stored in New York. Yet the company needs to have the capacity to move this data in between their two datacentres in these locations.
It’s not just a consolidation exercise, but a data synchronisation one and the challenge is to mitigate the impact of data and network latency, which usually increases the further apart datacentres are located from each other. The response has traditionally to place each datacentre in close proximity to themselves. Such as strategy for reducing latency is risky, because if a natural disaster were to occur the two datacentres could be affected and this would put your organisation’s ability to operate in jeopardy. Not only that, it could damage your reputation and lead to downtime and financial losses.
So, if your company or its products are reliant on video data, then there is a need to seek an approach that permits both datacentres to be placed outside of their respective circles of disruption – at a distance from each other. The answer isn’t to use WAN optimisation as this can’t deal with data compression efficiently. Instead data acceleration tools such as PORTrockIT should be deployed to allow encrypted and compressed video data to flow without being hindered by data and network latency, and it can reduce jitter that can spoil the viewing experience.
5G: Video demand to increase
In June 2017, Total Telecom wrote: “With 5G likely to become commercially available in 2020, operators have three years to lay the foundations of a network that will change the way people interact forever. The sheer volume of devices and data that will be created by 5G – some 25 billion, creating two zettabytes of data by 2025 according to Machina Research – means the network build-out will need to be of a scope unlike anything that has been done before.”
To meet the challenge of managing, streaming, back-up and restoring ever large amounts of data, large vendors such as Intel will no doubt tell you that there is a need to upgrade your existing infrastructure – particularly when 5G mobile networks are just around the corner. “Find out what it takes to envision, plan, and deploy critical service, performance, and IT management upgrades”, says Intel’s website. It suggests that network transformations are required to manage rich media, provide high-speed wireless connectivity, to manage hybrid cloud, to offer a 5G communications cloud, and to offer a Virtualized IP Multimedia Subsystem.
Time to intelligent
Netflix, for example, knows that this is important too. But the ability to view a film doesn’t just depend on having a subscription. Much also depends on the network speed being used by each viewer’s broadband. However, this doesn’t mean that company shouldn’t invest in data acceleration. It should certainly have the right network infrastructure solutions in place, because latency can begin at any point along a local area or wide area network.
By investing in their network infrastructure, they are investing in customer experience and customer loyalty – as well as in the potential present and future profitability of the firm. They can also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to present movies and TV programmes to their subscribers that they might just want to watch. So time to intelligence must be built into this capability, allowing fast, timely and real-time big data analysis. All of this can be achieved with data acceleration tools.
