Broadcast Data Center Grass Valley’s Vision for the Broadcast Plant of the FutureEnabling graceful broadcast-centric IP network scaling with a non-proprietary solution that supports vertically accurate switching.

GRASS VALLEY INNOVATION

Broadcasters Need the Advantages of an IT Data Center …

A typical IT Data Center provides a number of key advantages – and it’s easy to see the benefits of emulating this type of infrastructure.

SCALABILITY:

Whether scaling up or down, in an IT Data Center it is easy to add or stop services (using only what you need), as these services are primarily software applications running on distributed servers. New services are efficiently added by installing a new instance or via the automatic spawning of a new process. These new services are also easily killed when no longer needed. This is significantly less expensive and more agile than buying a new dedicated piece of hardware every time another service is needed.

LOAD BALANCE:

As services are distributed across many servers, the load on each server can be balanced. This is important to keep things running optimally.

COMMODITY HARDWARE:

For the most part, generic servers or switches, like those in use in most IT data centers, are less expensive, and will continue to get more cost effective, than purpose built hardware.

FAULT TOLERANCE, BACKUP AND REDUNDANCY:

IT Data Centers are designed to be non-blocking. There are often several different servers running the same process, and the services can be distributed, so that if one server fails, it does not bring down the entire system and recovery is fast.

IP MEANS AGILITY. It’s the number one reason broadcasters are even considering a migration from SDI to IP. With the agility of IP, broadcasters will be set up to handle the growing needs of their broadcast plant today and, perhaps even more importantly, their ability to continue expanding easily in the future is assured.

It’s this agility through technology that makes IP so appealing: High data rates, wide bandwidth and a system that’s both format agnostic and scalable for whatever the future brings.

Some early IP solutions for broadcast include IP switches with surrounding conversion equipment. But just installing IP switches, surrounded by SDI/IP conversion equipment, doesn’t take full advantage of what IP has to offer. In fact, using conversion equipment everywhere effectively eliminates the advantage of utilizing IP in the first place. It’s comparable to being in an analog-based facility and converting signals to digital only for transport, then converting back to analog at the target device – the digital transport is nice, but there’s no real operational or infrastructure benefit.

What the broadcast and media industries need is a broadcast-centric IP plant designed with the cost savings and efficiency of today’s IP network, but with the mission-critical reliability, extensibility, functionality and familiar workflows of today’s SDI broadcast world. What you need is a Broadcast Data Center. Here’s why…

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…While Overcoming Their Weaknesses

Latency: IP was built with a different model in mind than video. IP is packet-based, and with traditional data networks, as packets are sent they may get to their destination via different paths, at different times, at different packet rates and out of order, or they may get dropped completely. While this may be fine for some applications, such as handling email, or sending a file, with live video, we don’t have the luxury of waiting a few seconds for a packet to arrive. We need much higher precision in timing.

Bandwidth: Up until recently, the high sustained bandwidth of video (especially with 4K and higher resolutions) could not be moved across IP infrastructure quickly or sustainably due to the size of the pipes and traffic management. Now we have 10 GigE, 25 GigE and 40 GigE with the quad version of 25 GigE, namely 100 GigE, on the horizon in switches, which allows the timely passage of uncompressed video.

Video Processing: Broadcasters need to handle intensive computations needed for compression or signal processing, something that the IT Data Center is ill-equipped to handle. However, today this processing can be placed on something as small as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) within the Broadcast Data Center. In this way, broadcasters operating in the IP domain can benefit from very powerful, lightweight functions placed onto programmable, single board media specific processors, in essence replicating a blade server approach, with less power requirements, less weight and a smaller footprint.

From a practical standpoint, the best examples of the benefits of an IT Data Center are seen in the successful operations at Amazon, Google and Netflix.

• Each can add new services or apps quickly.

• They are always there, regardless of individual server failure, using only the resources they need at any given time.

• Each has IT Data Centers with racks upon racks of seemingly identical servers, with the cost benefit of buying in bulk – and the switches they use are fairly generic too – and as prices fall, due to Moore’s law, the cost of these items will fall too.

But as a broadcaster, you need more than just future format-ready bandwidth and what generic IT Data Centers offer. Our world – while based on the same digital ones and zeros – is a real-time processing and routing world, where delays and switches outside of frame boundaries can be disruptive, even devastating. You require vertically accurate switching, extremely low latency and, most important, the ability to process video the same way you do today in the SDI world. All of which can’t be provided by an IT Data Center. That’s why a Broadcast Data Center, with its broadcast-centric design, provides exactly what you need for your migration to IP production and infrastructure design.

GV Convergent

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Aggregation

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GV Node Edge Switching and Flexible Processing

Examples of Processing

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GV Convergent & GV NodeCore & Aggregation Layer Control with IP Edge Switching & Processing for Broadcast Data Centers

UP/DOWN/CROSS CONVERSION

MOSAIC BUILDING

COLOR CORRECTION

TRANSCODING

ENCODING

DOLBY-E PROCESSING

The Broadcast Data Center

From an overarching perspective, Grass Valley’s Glass-to-Glass IP Solution encompasses all production elements: acquisition, switching, playout, replay, editing, routing, monitoring and distribution. But it’s the elements of the Broadcast Data Center within that solution that makes it work, by providing a broadcast-centric infrastructure capable of transporting and processing both IP and SDI signals, while delivering the innate benefits of an IT Data Center to broadcasters.

Within these solutions are the GV Convergent software defined networking (SDN) control system, and the GV Node real time IP processing and routing platform. Working together, these two broadcast-centric platforms control IP and SDI (including MADI) signal transport transparently and accurately so that operational staff handle IP signals in exactly the same way they handle SDI signals – all with deterministic timing and the reliability that a signal will be where it’s needed at the exact time it’s needed, without dropping frames or adding significant latency.

Vertically Accurate SwitchingOne of the most important differentiators of the Broadcast Data Center to other proprietary and COTS IP switching solutions is its vertically accurate, deterministic switching capability. This functionality is critical because COTS IP switches are ineffective for some live applications, due to their inability to perform switching in the vertical interval when used as a back-up to the production switcher. Vertically accurate switching is also needed when a router is used for providing secondary live feeds.

Vertically accurate switching is one area where GV Convergent and GV Node work hand-in-hand within the Broadcast Data Center, especially for edge switching and video processing.

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GV Node performs the actual IP switching at the edge of the Broadcast Data Center fabric and enhances the capabilities of the “Top of Rack” switch usually deployed in a data center by providing video and metadata processing, including a full-function Kaleido multiviewer. GV Node also provides I/O for connection with end devices (such as production switchers, cameras and servers) in IP, or for legacy compatibility, in SDI or MADI. Finally, GV Node aggregates 1 Tb/s of IP bandwidth via 12, 40 Gb/s IP connections to higher order aggregation layers of a Broadcast Data Center. Because of these capabilities, GV Node is the world’s first product which allows broadcasters to reap the benefits of an IT Data Center topology without sacrificing the vertical accuracy and latency requirements of broadcast.

GV Convergent controls the IP core and aggregation layers of the Broadcast Data Center architecture, as well as any IP COTS switches and GV Node. GV Convergent tells the different layers what to do and when to do it, so the infrastructure looks like a standard SDI infrastructure. System bandwidth is managed to prevent packet reordering and discarding.

• 1 Tb/s of aggregation bandwidth• High-density, real time processing

– Up/down/crossconversion – Dolby E – Encoding – Transcoding – Color correction – Mosaic building

• Flexible downstream I/O – IP – SDI – MADI

• Broadcast performance – Vertical accuracy – Low (< 2.4 lines) latency* – Hybrid audio routing/manipulation

• Standards-based – SMPTE 2022-6 – SMPTE 2022-7 (future release)

GV Node Key Features at a Glance

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GV Node: The world’s first true real-time IP processing and routing platform

Multiple GV Nodes can be readily connected to a COTS switch to create large and flexible monitoring, switching and processing systems. GV Node can be added to both existing facilities as a “top of rack” expansion, and as a scalable standalone system that can grow as your needs increase and as new technologies become available.

Use Case – GV Node as IP Aggregation

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• Vertical Interval Switching

• Up to 144 3G-SDI Signals (480 Gb/s Media Backplane) Aggregated to 12 Cables

• 144 Signals (16 Slots with 9 Signals Each)

• 40 Gig Ethernet Fiber x12

SDI ⁄IMADI I⁄O

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Use Case – GV Node as Processing Node

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Scalability Determined by IP Switch Capability

No Vertical Interval Switching

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HYBRID AUDIO ROUTING/MANIPULATION

VERTICAL ACCURACY SMPTE 2022-6

LOW (< 2.4 LINES) LATENCY*

SMPTE 2022-7 (FUTURE RELEASE)

BROADCAST- CENTRIC

IPMADI

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SDI

FLEXIBLE DOWNSTREAM

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Leveraging a Spine-Leaf Architecture

GV Node enables highly scalable, distributed topologies which leverage COTS IP switches in combination with a “spine-leaf” architecture. The core is behind the spine (aggregation layer) and the leaf (edge layer) that’s typical of modern IT infrastructures (see diagram below). This topology represents a much more scalable and flexible approach than a traditional, centralized routing system which forces the purchase of larger, more expensive chas-sis than would actually be necessary in order to preserve the potential for future expansion.

What makes a spine-leaf architecture so unique is that every leaf switch connects to any other leaf switch through only one spine switch. In this way, no matter which leaf switch a piece of equipment is connected to, it crosses the same number of devices to get to another piece of equipment. This keeps the latency to a minimum, deterministic value as the IP-based

data only has to hop to a spine switch and another leaf switch to get to its destination. If both edge devices share a common leaf, their signals are routed to the spine in order to match the delay and maintain determinism. The spine-leaf topology is non-blocking, which enables this technique to provide the lowest possible deterministic delay.

IP-based routing infrastructures based on spine-leaf architectures are far easier to design than traditional SDI-based infrastructures and come with a great many benefits (see the Agility chart which follows). These benefits show why all modern IT Data Centers take this approach.

Limitations for BroadcastersUnfortunately, the IT Data Center approach is not suitable for broadcasters in its current form. IT Data Center architectures include aspects that are unsuitable for broadcast, such as the inability to have vertically-accurate switching, a reliance on expensive CPU-based computing and, if unmanaged, latency for live production applications and more.

Overcoming LimitationsThe Broadcast Data Center is designed to address these limitations, in combination with providing the benefits of an IT Data Center, namely COTS switches that deliver great economy, scalability, fault tolerance and the benefit of an aggregation/core infrastructure.

What brings these benefits all together in the Broadcast Data Center is the GV Convergent SDN control system. GV Convergent knows how to control and manage traffic through both IP switches and SDI routers, while controlling edge switching and orchestrating bandwidth with a design for the needs of broadcasters.

The Broadcast Data Center provides vertically-accurate switching brought about by GV Node. Controlled by GV Convergent, GV Node’s real time, distributed routing and IP processing supports both IP and SDI workflows. Additionally, GV Convergent and GV Node provide a number of other broadcast-centric benefits so that an IP infrastructure mimics traditional SDI workflows and processes. As the first component of Grass Valley’s Broadcast Data Center, GV Node makes the stability, flexibility and agility of the IT Data Center a reality for broadcasters – with no sacrifices.

A small-scale spine-leaf architecture as used in typical IP infrastructures.

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Belden, Belden Sending All The Right Signals and the Belden logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Belden Inc. or its affiliated companies in the United States and other jurisdictions. Grass Valley and GV Node are trademarks or registered trademarks of Grass Valley. Belden Inc., Grass Valley and other parties may also have trademark rights in other terms used herein.

Copyright © 2015 Grass Valley. All rights reserved.

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Grass Valley Innovation Broadcast Data Center

Agility IP Data Center vs Broadcast Data Center

Process IP Data Center Broadcast Data Center

Agility of Service Deployment ✔ ✔

Scalability (ease of upgrading) ✔ ✔

Non-Blocking ✔ ✔

Graceful Fault Tolerance ✔ ✔

Ease of Upgrade ✔ ✔

High Bandwidth (uncompressed video) ✔ ✔

Format Agnostic ✔ ✔

Vertically Accurate Video-over-IP Switching (edge- or destination-based) ✘ ✔

Native SDI Connections Supported ✘ ✔

Low Latency (less than 1 video frame) ▲ ✔

Computational Intensity for Encoding (i.e., HEVC) ▲ ✔

Programmable FPGA Blades ✘ ✔

Grass Valley’s Broadcast Data Center delivers an agile IP-based infrastructure capable of meeting the performance needs of broadcasters.

Glass-to-Glass IP: From acquisition to playout

Maximizing Business Flexibility & Agility

As the first company to offer a Glass-to-Glass IP solution – from camera to multiviewer wall – the Broadcast Data Center, GV Convergent and GV Node all build on the foundation we at Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, have already laid. As a broadcast equipment supplier, we remain unique in this capability.

With the advent of the Broadcast Data Center, we are enabling native IP terminal devices such as cameras, production switchers, servers and replay devices to be direct connected over IP to a scalable, fault tolerant infrastructure that is fully IP.

As part of our Glass-to-Glass IP solution, the Broadcast Data Center means that you get all the advantages of data center topologies: scalability, graceful fault tolerance and flexible processing, with support for the features needed in live broadcast: vertical accuracy for primary and secondary switching, hybrid audio and video routing and ultra-low latency. Because Grass Valley lets you go IP all the way to terminal gear, you get true multiformat support over one wire, whether HD or 4K.

Full IP also allows us to support dual-path redundancy – typical in IP designs all through the signal chain – and because we don’t need racks and racks of IP conversion gear, we eliminate a point of failure and are significantly more economical.

* The delay through GV Node is less than 2.4 lines as measured from input (IP, SDI or MADI) to output (IP, SDI or MADI) exclusive of audio embed/de-embed or processing delays.