Software based video encoder firm Envivio, has moved its Guru system, which it describes as a Network Management System, to general availability. It was pushed out in beta in December last year. Guru allows for monitoring a head end and troubleshooting it, even if the head end contains non-Envivio encoding elements supplied by rivals.
Cloud based video platforms are among the growing list of software solutions which encoder suppliers are offering. Recently companies like Elemental and Envivio, after establishing themselves as software-encoding specialists in the mid-2000s, have been broadening their product lines – fleshing out offerings from a start in encoding for live events and VoD catalogs, to live channel, and now want to position themselves where older encoding businesses sit, running the management to an entire head end.
Video delivery networks have the requirement of being low-latency and high-bandwidth, and the delivery of data streams is further complicated by the increasing demand for the highest video quality and compatibility inside the multi-screen home. There is also the fact that not all channels are created equal – some customers are paying more for premium channels, and if the network is going to fail in any way operators would prefer it affect those channels with the smallest revenue impact. So Guru provides monitoring, load balancing and failover across a cluster of channels.
Cloud virtualization grew out of the principles of software-defined networking (SDN). SDN abstracts traffic flow decisions from the forwarding plane inside router hardware and instead manages them in software, this allows for greater optimization of data transfer. Recently the term SDV (software-defined video) has been tossed around by Elemental, Harmonic and Ericsson to describe their new cloud-virtualization software packages which leverage these principles to offer integrated encoding and distribution platforms for OTT and IPTV services.
The Envivio announcement doesn’t include terms like ‘cloud’ or ‘virtualization,’ but we see facets of the service which are analogous to SDV. Envivio states that Guru is compatible with third party hardware and software, whether the network is OTT, IPTV, cable or satellite.
The task of Guru is to represent the network service status meaningfully to an operator, and also to predictively monitor for network problems and explain their potential impact in terms relevant to an operator and not network engineers – i.e. how much money is that going to lose me and which button fixes that.
Additionally, Guru offers redundancy failover, which automates the shifting of tasks from failing network nodes to others which can seamless pick up the job to insure continuous playback, and workflow management to optimize video delivery.