Understanding the Transition from Appliances to Virtualized Infrastructure

Software in production and broadcast environments is largely deployed using an appliance-based architecture. Software-based appliances solve many problems for developers, broadcast engineers, and maintenance staff.  However,... [ view full abstract ]

Software in production and broadcast environments is largely deployed using an appliance-based architecture. Software-based appliances solve many problems for developers, broadcast engineers, and maintenance staff.  However, appliances are rigid and often underutilized, qualities that are incompatible with the rapid evolution of our industry.  Those same problems have been addressed by the enterprise IT industry by using virtualization-based software stacks, achieving great gains in deployment and operational efficiency.

The transition to service-oriented broadcast infrastructure has already begun. The early days of this migration have utilized approaches that emulate the traditional nature of current-generation technology, such as the simple unmanaged virtualization of appliances and the packetization of baseband video.  While these emulations are valuable first steps, progress will march on towards “pure” abstraction.  The ongoing standardization of essence-based production video-over-IP standards provide tremendous opportunity for production systems to capitalize on the flexibility and cost-efficiency of commercial off-the-shelf data center technology.  For that vision to be realized, rigid appliances must be abstracted into the application layer of the computing stack, just as digital video has been abstracted into the application layer of the networking stack. 

This paper provides a survey of service abstraction technology including hardware virtualization, containerization, and both private and public cloud.  Specifically, virtualization management approaches are examined including discrete hypervisors, managed compute systems, and private cloud technology.  Next, practical considerations are discussed such as performance, redundancy, and resiliency offered by traditional architectures and how these qualities compare to that of the virtualization-based systems that will inevitability replace them. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the human aspect is considered.  The way in which an organization’s staff will design, document, deploy, and troubleshoot tomorrow’s systems will be radically changed, and challenge principals that have been followed by broadcasters for decades.  The design, engineering, and maintenance teams in most large broadcasting organizations are typically structured around self-contained islands exchanging video.  A vertical stack with common shared resources is a fundamental requirement for efficient virtualized infrastructure and will redefine the collaboration of broadcast engineering teams.

This paper is intended to act as a tutorial on the broad topic of infrastructure virtualization and leave attendees with the following takeaways:

• A reflection on the implicit characteristics of software-based appliances that must be addressed in a virtualization transition
• An understanding of the differences between unmanaged virtualization, managed compute, and private cloud approaches
• Practical technical considerations for the first steps of infrastructure virtualization