Content Delivery System: What Cisco Did - and Hasn't Yet Done

By Jonathan Tombes

Unveiling its content delivery system (CDS) earlier this month, Cisco Systems execs indicated that they had executed their plan for the technology acquired from Arroyo Video Solutions.

Announced in August and closed in September, the Arroyo acquisition came a couple of months after Motorola picked up DRAM-based server vendor Broadus Technologies. At the time, Cisco Systems Senior Director of Internet Protocol TV and Video Deployment Kip Compton dispelled any notion that Cisco had gotten its second choice and underscored the networking giant's preference for the software-focused solution offered by Arroyo.

"We have a lot of products where we leverage standard hardware. We'll take a server from an OEM supplier," Compton had said at the time. "We'll actually put in our own software, and sell it as an appliance." (For more, see this article.)

And that's what has happened. "We're offering (the Arroyo-based software) in a package that includes basically an appliance," Compton said in an interview timed around the formal launch of the CDS at the ITU Telecom World event in Hong Kong. "It's a fully integrated Cisco product at this point, available for cable operators now."

More specifically, Cisco introduced a family of content delivery engines (CDEs) using "industry-standard type hardware" that are configured to run one of five Cisco content delivery applications (CDAs): vault, TV streamer, TV playout, integrated streamer-vault and content delivery system manager.

Clearly aiming at cable and telco markets, Cisco names one cable reference from the pre-Cisco Arroyo solution, Time Warner Cable, Portland, ME. (For more, see this article from April 2006.)

"We've actually been doing some significantly larger systems with some additional customers," Compton said. But the Portland system, which also makes use of Cisco's 7600 series routers, ONS 15454 optical networking platform, QAM modulators and digital network control system (DNCS), is for now the company's public proof of how its distributed appliances are able to "act like a single logical server."

And consonant with a network-based, on-demand transition several years in the making, Compton refers to the servers - or appliances - as standing squarely within a larger context.

"(Cable operators) can deploy these around their network without any of the historical disadvantages, and as VOD continues to scale up, the savings in network transport and increased resilience of having a mesh of appliances across multiple locations becomes pretty significant."

Service velocity

As for speed of deployment, a metric that has been underscored by Cisco's competition, Compton said that it depends on the situation.

In cases where there is an open back office, "deployments can go extremely quickly." Starting from scratch, greenfield deployments naturally "take more time." In replacement scenarios, he said deployments are "relatively quick," although "the client software is a little bit tricky, because in some cases proprietary VOD systems have proprietary clients."

The most complicated scenario, because of the attendant integration issues, "is the customer who has proprietary systems and they're looking to add on to those systems," he said.

Another issue that has surfaced in on-demand deployment discussions, especially in light of the growing numbers of hours available to subscribers, is the time it takes to load content. Compton said that while options vary, a typical way is for operators to set up the new server and have the pitcher start feeding it before beginning to wire QAM modulators.

"Usually by the time they've done all of their other things, they've charged up … (with) the vast majority of the content," he said.

The uBR model?

While Cisco has done what it said it would do, some wonder whether it will do more. As noted in our late August article, at least one analyst, IDC's Eve Griliches, has suggested that this CDS technology would fit well within Cisco's routing platform.

Of course, that's more or less what Cisco did 10 years ago, when it bolted RF ports to a router, creating what became the uBR family of CMTSs.

That presumably would take longer than three months to pull off and would take Cisco down more of a purpose-built, hardware road for its on-demand portfolio. For now, the company seems content to ride the "leading price/performance" indicators of commercial off-the-shelf servers, exploit the Arroyo algorithms and package them within network appliances designed to help operators and other service providers cope with the growing profusion of on-demand content, destined for ever more consumer end devices.

- Jonathan Tombes