MediaCAST enterprise management
Media and Content Delivery and Management Toolset
MediaCAST Enterprise Management is a software enhancement option for the system. It includes a set of tools for organizations that are forecasting expanding usage of digital media and for large enterprise-wide implementations of media streaming and digital content. It adds support for automatic content replication, replication queuing, creation of multiple media server farms, management of dispersed media farms and media server load-balancing.
Content replication provides a seamless method of automatic content copying from a primary site out to one or more media and content servers located at other sites. It is important when wanting to deliver high-quality streaming video to users located in different locations to consider the bandwidth availability. The network bandwidth between the users' locations and your storage and streaming server may limit how many people can view content concurrently and/or the quality of the viewing experience. MediaCAST Enterprise Management gives organizations the necessary capabilities to install Media Appliances strategically at the sites that do not have the necessary bandwidth for the number of users that will be supported. In this architecture all users can view high-quality content while minimizing the impact on the WAN bandwidth or Internet connection. As new content is added to MediaCAST it is automatically replicated to the other sites' Media Appliances. This can be done immediately or scheduled for replication during off-hours.
Load-balancing features allow multiple Media Appliances to be configured in the system. This allows a user’s requests for high-bandwidth content to automatically be delivered from the “best” location based on availablity or media server load. The content may be delivered from a local Media Appliances from the building's LAN or the best location may be the centralized media farm located on a different campus or in a different city. Additionally, it provide an easy mechanism for increasing scalability in the number of simultaneous streams of video, as well as storage capacity.
You are no longer forced to throw out a server because you need more storage space or a higher number of simultaneous streams. You can load-balance older and newer hardware within the same system for a long-term, cost-effective solution.
Every Media Appliance has a limit to the number of concurrent on-demand streams that can be delivered based on the hardware configuration. As the need to support an increasing number of users and subsequent streams of video grows, multiple Media Appliances are needed. These can be added over time in a modular fashion. They work together to deliver the increased capacity without making it more difficult for IT staff to manage content on multiple servers and without making it harder for users to find and view content and to tie licensing back to the primary system.
Failover is designed into the system so if a Media Appliances is unavailable for any reason the load-balanced Media Appliances will continue to deliver the required content to the user. The design of the load-balancing and redundant architecture provides a cost-effective solution for supporting centralized management and delivery as well as distributed Media Appliances around the organization.