The partnership between Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, and Cisco continues with a new bundled product offering featuring Cisco Switches, now available directly through Grass Valley. As part of an integrated commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) IP approach, the Cisco Nexus 9200 and 9300 kits provide the COTS IP network infrastructure, licenses, and support required for all of Grass Valley’s IP-enabled products; not only do these solutions accelerate and ease installation and setup, they also ensure compatibility with Grass Valley’s IP Broadcast Data Center solutions.
Cisco’s IP fabric for media solution expands—and in some cases, replaces—traditional baseband video routing in live, news, and content distribution applications with an IP-based infrastructure. When combined with Grass Valley’s IP-enabled cameras, servers, production switchers and other endpoint gear, it provides a tested solution for reliable audio, video, and ancillary data flows over an IP network.
“The time has never been better to transition to IP. The combination of Grass Valley infrastructure with a COTS Cisco network provides a best-in-class solution with the scalability and performance required of a true IP broadcast data center,” said Marco Lopez, president, Grass Valley. “This media network kit will help make IP even more accessible and is yet another example of how a partnership between two industry leaders provides more integrated solutions and smoother service for customers.”
As a Solutions Technology Integrator (STI) partner, Grass Valley has established a strong relationship with Cisco to help guide the ongoing development of IP networking solutions for the broadcast and media markets, including support for all the broadcast industry IP open standards. The initial stage of this agreement allows Grass Valley to integrate COTS IP network switches into its solutions that are specifically designed for creating zero-drop, non-blocking multicast networks for media.
“IP is a landscape where you see different companies have varying areas of expertise. When innovative companies like Cisco and Grass Valley form strategic alliances to combine their knowledge and solutions, everyone benefits,” said. Andres Sintes, senior director, business development, Global Sales Scaling, Cisco. “We’re proud to offer customers our switches and technical support through Grass Valley as part of a complete IP package that addresses what our customers need today to support their next-step goals.”
In addition to the Cisco Switch kits, Grass Valley will be reselling Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) which unifies and automates Cisco Nexus infrastructure for data center management across Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. The DCNM server provides close control and monitoring of the IP fabric and will handle complex scenarios of varying flow sizes and multiple spines, while providing an interface to the GV Convergent control system for overarching transparent control of a hybrid SDI/IP network.
