Cisco eases video management

Cisco Systems continued to build its enterprise video infrastructure with the (ECDS), a software-hardware platform to ease video management and make distribution of video to remote locations more efficient, says PC World.

ECDS is part of Cisco's overall Medianet architecture, designed to automate many aspects of producing and delivering video for employees, partners and customers.

The company has been fleshing out this vision since 2006 with an eye to supporting new work styles and the growing network demands that come with them. The purpose of ECDS is to help enterprises distribute both live and on-demand video to large numbers of sites and users.

ECDS helps optimise live and on-demand one-way video content for a variety of applications such as organisational communications, training, events or executive broadcasts, according to eWeek.

IT managers can use ECDS to scale live video streaming without having to turn on multicast. For example, instead of sending 10 video streams of a broadcast to 10 users at a branch office, ECDS sends one stream to the branch and automatically splits that stream at the branch into one for each end user.

On-demand video content, like employee training videos or recorded telepresence meetings, can be pushed out across the WAN during off-peak hours, and then cached locally for access by multiple users.

“This is part of the evolution of the IP network to where video is the majority of the content,” says Guido Jouret, VP and GM of Cisco's enterprise video group and CTO of the emerging technologies group, notes InformationWeekl.

As video begins to be used on a more routine basis, IT managers need new tools to assure video quality while avoiding network overload, he said.