body’s wedged open the door between the two.
Of course, hardware equipment tends to fail more
often than buildings catch fire, but when we’re
really designing for true redundancy, all factors
need to be on the table. Total mirrored hardware
systems in disparate, geographic locations are
cost prohibitive, even for large broadcasters,
but in the brave new world of integrated, CiaB
(channel-in-a-box) and virtualized systems, it no
longer has to be!
HOW MANY “9S” DO YOU WANT?
Cloud providers tell you that you can have as
many “9s” as you want - and can quickly tell you
what that equates to in the number of minutes
downtime you can expect in a year. Greater reli-
ability, with dual or triple redundant configura-
tions, all comes at a price however. In practice,
I think a lot of broadcasters may be overstating
how reliable they need things to be. When you
dig down a bit further, what they’ve achieved
themselves in the last five years might be impres-
sive (the signal was OK leaving me!), but if they
have a fire tomorrow or an aircraft lands on the
building, it’s going to wipe them out. So, on one
hand you could argue they’ve been lucky, (no air-
planes) and they’ve got reliable equipment - but
are they really comparing like-for-like?
A cloud provider’s comprehensive redundancy
is at a scale far beyond what can be created “in
house”. Some cloud providers aren’t even talking
about the number of nines anymore, as they can
point to 100% uptime for some services, world-
wide.
A key “take home” point here, is that the all cloud
providers say you need to design your system to
take advantage of the inherent redundancy that
the cloud can provide. So, the onus is on us, the
application developers, to correctly utilize cloud
APIs and services into our solutions and with it
the ability to tap into their redundant infrastruc-
ture. We must not fall into the trap of exactly
replicating the designs and architectures we are
used to.
HOW MANY “9S” DO I REALLY NEED?
Broadcasters have always over spec’d things in
38 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com
the name of seeking greater reliability. However,
if you’re running a 24/7 broadcast service, rep-
licating everything in the cloud and building-in
vast amounts of over-capacity (in cloud-speak –
overprovisioning) this might cancel out the very
reasons you want put it in the cloud to begin with.
Because it’s more flexible, the cloud allows you to
design different levels of redundancy for differ-
ent services. When we think in this way, you can
easily imagine a scenario where you can dynami-
cally over-provision during critical broadcasting
periods, such as sports finals, etc. This would
allow you to guarantee a higher level of protec-
tion during a Super Bowl or playoffs week, which
you could then scale back for the reminder of the
season. Taking a 30 second outage hit during a
Super Bowl commercial is a much harder financial
hit than the same outage during a late-night real-
ity show. In this way, business rules logic can be
applied to automatically scale redundancy in line
with the agreed upon revenue risk.
When designing for redundancy in the cloud, it’s
important to ask for something sensible. What
do you really need to duplicate? Making fair com-
parisons with traditional hardware systems is not
always straightforward.
If you elect not to make the leap into the cloud -
which still makes a great deal of sense for many
scenarios - you still have to put your equipment
somewhere, cool it, power it, maintain it, account
for hardware refresh, perform routine compliance
testing, etc., all whilst maintaining competent
staff. You can’t just look at the initial equipment
spend that you would have made on the project,
you have to factor in all the things you are no
longer paying for. Most importantly, you have to
draw comparisons on scalability and think about
those airplanes.
Ian is one of the founding
directors of Pebble Beach
Systems, having worked
on software projects in the
broadcast industry for over 25
years. He has been instrumen-
tal in the development and
implementation of the com-
pany’s range of automation
and channel-in-a-box products at broadcasters
and service providers around the world. Ian has
also worked as a consultant for companies such
as Reuters, NTL and The Walt Disney Company.