{"id":34448,"date":"2019-02-20T11:42:36","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T03:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/?p=34448"},"modified":"2019-02-20T11:42:38","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T03:42:38","slug":"bloombergs-intent-based-network-ensures-seamless-broadcast-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/2019\/02\/20\/bloombergs-intent-based-network-ensures-seamless-broadcast-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloomberg\u2019s intent-based network ensures seamless broadcast services"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bloomberg Television is Bloomberg Media\u2019s global business and financial television network, available in more than 437 million households worldwide. The network streams live on Bloomberg\u2019s digital and mobile properties, along with Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung TV and Roku. A world-class network infrastructure was needed to support the availability, reliability, and performance needed for eight hours of live television and four hours of live radio every day. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their new media\nproduction network connects the central studio, three other broadcast\npositions, two recording studios, a photography studio and three control rooms\nand all of Bloomberg TV\u2019s production equipment. The all-IP data network\nincludes 90+ network nodes, 400+ 40GbE network fabric links, 4,000+ network\nports, and 2,000+ live network endpoints connecting at a combination of 10GbE,\n40GbE and 100GbE \u2013 not to mention a 14 petabyte video storage system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nopportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tony Lott, Bloomberg Global Head of Capital\nProjects for the company\u2019s IT infrastructure team, along with Bloomberg Project\nLeader Inderpal Khattran, saw the new facility as an opportunity to create from\nscratch a radical state-of-the-art network. And their vision was to deliver it\non time and within budget to support today\u2019s operations and well into the\nfuture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They opted for\nspine-leaf topology to provide consistency of data volume, scale and\ndeterministic application performance. \nBloomberg Television\u2019s reputation depends on providing a seamless\nbroadcast experience for a worldwide audience of millions, so they wanted\nautomation to continuously check, monitor, and validate the health of the\nnetwork. The need for greater insight into the network fabric created a long\nchecklist of stringent compliance requirements, including a dashboard that\nshowed the health of the network and compliance to the stakeholders across the\nOperations, Security and Compliance departments. They needed a single platform\nable to collect all the telemetry from a variety of switch models and vendors\nin an agnostic manner, to normalize the data and store it in such a way that\nthe engineering teams could query it in real-time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg Television runs\nits own broadcast TV playout across one of the spine-leaf fabrics within the\ncampus building. So the IT department wanted the equivalent capability for the\nmulticast traffic on that network \u2013 a notoriously difficult task, as the\nmulticast network\u2019s state is constantly moving and changing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg Television\u2019s\nIT team looked at several solutions and combinations before opting for an\nintent-based, vendor agnostic solution. Intent-Based Analytics is not just\nabout gathering telemetry, it’s about processing the telemetry using a\nsophisticated big data pipeline and comparing it against a single source of\ntruth (i.e. “intent”) to validate that the networking meets intent\nacross general health, performance, traffic and compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No other solution\ncould match Apstra\u2019s Intent-Based Data Center Automation. It not only could ensure\nthe general health and performance of the network, the Apstra Operating System\n(AOS) could be programmed to verify that the network met compliance at all\ntimes \u2013 for example, to certify that all new software going into their\nenvironment met the proper criteria for compliance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mansour Karam, Apstra\u2019s Founder and CEO,\nexplained the initial task: \u201cWhen we came in to the Bloomberg building, the\nnetwork was already there. So, what we had to do was discover the state of the\nnetwork, the topology of the network, the capabilities of the network, with our\nsolution. [AOS has] this network discovery capability that is critical for\nbrown-field environments so that we can come into an already-existing\nenvironment that we leveraged and enhanced in order to deliver on Bloomberg\u2019s\nrequirements and deploy our solution in their environment\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of Bloomberg Television\u2019s requirements\nwas that the AOS agents run off-box. Karam explained: \u201cWhen we launched the\nsolution initially, we had on-box agents. These agents ran on the devices.\nThat\u2019s how we had it packaged, but it wasn\u2019t a requirement of the architecture.\u201d\nHe added: \u201cWe have a distributed architecture with our product where it\u2019s a\nvery modular architecture. Every service, every piece of logic, is implemented\nas a separate process, including those agents in which they\u2019re experts at the\ndevices that the solution controls. In fact, this concept of agents is critical\nto the ability for our solution to be multi-vendor, because these agents are\nthe experts at those devices.\u201d So, for Bloomberg, they were readily able to run\nthe agents off-box as required.
\n
\nThe solution was secured and certified for Bloomberg Television\u2019s data center\nand soon proved its ability to continuously validate operator\u2019s intent, while\nproviding an early warning indicator of potential grey failures. An immediate\nbenefit was that a number of existing network issues were immediately\npinpointed \u2013 issues that no-one had yet detected. Such visibility into grey\nfailures and Root Cause Identification is critical for such a complex and\nchangeable environment  \u2013 zero downtime\nis an absolute must for a broadcast TV network. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reward<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With immediate answers\nto detailed questions about the network\u2019s health and performance, Tony Lott\u2019s\nteam can take preventative action long before issues become noticeable to the\nproduction staff. For compliance purposes, the team has gained a single point\nof reference, according to Tony Lott: \u201cApstra\u2019s system gives us a single view into\nthe entire network \u2013 regardless of our devices, switches, operating systems or\nvendors. It has enabled us to gain the day-2 operations efficiency needed to\nmanage and sustain the complex network infrastructure in our cutting-edge\nfacility.\u201d It has already helped to reduce the company\u2019s OPEX by almost half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back-end network infrastructure,\nsecurity, and compliance are vital for delivering a seamless broadcast TV\nexperience for millions of viewers around the world. As Karam said: \u201cThis is a very modern, state-of-the-art building\u2026 Because of its\nstringent requirements, the decision was to have a network in there that is\ndatacentre-class, very similar to the type of networks you have in datacentres.\nSo, while it was a deviation from our market segment focus, the technology was\nvery aligned with what our technology was capable of doing\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing across the globe is that new campuses, new\nbuildings, are really transforming\u2026 There is this concept of smart buildings \u2013 with\nIoT, with digital transformation, with the requirement for sustainability \u2013\nputting a much bigger load on the network as the foundation to deliver on those\nrequirements as part of those state-of-the-art modern campuses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Network architects and\nengineers in a wide range of business sectors face similar challenges, and technologies\noriginally inspired by the needs of hyperscale data centers now offer\nremarkably elegant solutions. That is partly why this deployment is so\nsignificant. Lott, Karam and the Bloomberg IT team would agree: this surely is\nthe way to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apstra built its reputation on work for massive telco, cloud provider, and Enterprise data centers. A recent deployment for Bloomberg marks a striking departure: demonstrating how Apstra\u2019s vendor agnostic Intent-Based Data Center Automation can be applied to benefit any highly complex and critical network. Great news for the broader enterprise market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34449,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[6089,96],"class_list":["post-34448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines","tag-apstra","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}