Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 IBC Show | Page 36

CLOUD VS . TRADITIONAL PLAYOUT DESIGNING PROPERLY FOR REDUNDANCY

By IAN COCKETT , CTO / CO-FOUNDER , PEBBLE BEACH SYSTEMS
Designing for redundancy in cloud-based , virtualized playout environments , in some ways is no different from building systems the old way - you need to search out and eliminate the single points of failure . In the cloud , you , or your provider , just have to look at a larger picture . The best on-premises broadcast system design in the world can easily fail if the building power or cooling hasn ’ t been designed properly . I ’ ve seen public broadcasters go offair , simply because something failed outside of the broadcast engineers ’ remit . So , while you can argue that traditional redundancy and disaster recovery ( DR ) systems only go as far as you can afford , it ’ s interesting to note that cloud datacenters are there to worry about much of that for you - 24 / 7 .
If you go with a large “ public ” cloud provider , you are , in effect , outsourcing the design of the datacenter to an organization who ’ s doing things at a much larger scale than what a typical broadcaster would , or could ever do . The market leaders build multiple , physically separated datacenters each time they launch in a new region , so you ’ ve got an instant level of redundancy built-in as part of the core service . If you choose a more “ local ” datacenter , that could simply be a place to rack your servers up , you might just be transferring the problem somewhere else . The really big cloud providers already have the scale to be able to ride out almost any problem . Let ’ s face it , most broadcasters would totally shut down and go off-air if they had a fire in their main equipment room , and there are very few companies who have true geographic redundancy . It ’ s understandable , since for the vast majority of my career , people have really only ever focused on equipment redundancy . “ Here ’ s our DR side ,” they say on the tour , and it ’ s the other side of the corridor from the main equipment room . Then you notice that some-
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