The Olympics have just started and this year NBC is streaming real-time events over the Internet in addition to the prime-time televised programming. Employees with computers and tablets and smart phones will be tempted to watch high-profile events online during work hours. In the US, this will happen during the work day, due to the time shift from London to the US.
How do you keep the Olympics video from blowing up your network?
How do you make sure that your enterprise applications and video from being impacted by entertainment traffic?
I presented a session at Enterprise Connect 2012 on “How to Keep Video from Blowing Up Your Network.” The presentation slides are on nojitter.com in two posts (Part 1, and Part2). Of course, the in-person presentation is better, because I augment the slides with stories and examples. 😉
The basic story is to use the network infrastructure to help identify and categorize network traffic. Then apply QoS and filtering to admit the traffic you want to support while de-prioritizing or denying the traffic that you don’t want to support. You can use some simple tricks for some of the traffic to identify the source and filter on it. In other cases, you may need to employ more sophisticated policies if the desired video source is from a content provider that is also used by an undesirable video provider.
I predict that at some point, we’re going to see video feeds have digital signatures and the network infrastructure will need to check the signature and perform filtering and QoS based on whether the video is signed by an approved source.
-Terry