- Cisco today announced the Cisco Enterprise Content Delivery System (ECDS), a set of video distribution products that work together to address IT leaders' growing challenge of delivering the highest-quality live and on-demand video content to end users anywhere, anytime.
- As enterprise IT leaders are facing rapidly rising demands for video on already overloaded networks, ECDS provides, according to Cisco, a seamless way to manage the video load on the wide area network (WAN) and, at the same time, help control the cost of extending video applications across the organization.
- Janice Le Litvinoff, director and general manager, Digital Media Systems business unit, Cisco, commented, "As businesses use video on a daily basis to increase employee engagement and enhance customer service, IT leaders must wrestle with how to manage the exploding amount of video content over the network, and in particular constrained WAN connections. A key advantage of ECDS that appeals to IT is they can 'set it and forget it.' With Cisco ECDS, organizations can optimize their networks to support evolving needs for video today and scale to support tomorrow's uses."
- As a key video infrastructure component of the Cisco medianet architecture, ECDS consists of hardware appliances and Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) virtual blade software. The appliances and software work together to help organizations distribute live video content via streaming or multicasting, and, on-demand video via caching and prepositioning. ECDS also provides an IT-friendly management system for easy setup, configuration, maintenance, and monitoring of video. ECDS works together with Cisco WAAS to form a complete WAN optimization solution for video, applications and data.
- Network managers can flexibly deploy ECDS in any appliance-based or existing virtualized environment at almost any place in the network, enabling customers to maximize previous investments. With comprehensive video format support, ECDS can scale to support from dozens to thousands of users in thousands of locations.
- For end users, ECDS helps ensure the best video experience for both scheduled and dynamic, unplanned video content. ECDS can eliminate delays in video playback, intermittent video interruptions, pixilation and other issues commonly associated with video delivery and reception.
- ECDS is comprised of three deployment options: The Cisco Media Delivery Engine 1100 and the Cisco MDE 3100 are network appliances that scale to 500 and 5,000 concurrent users respectively. The third option is the Cisco MDE 50WVB, a software virtual blade that supports up to 200 simultaneous users on a Cisco WAAS appliance.
- All three ECDS products work together to deliver video as needed without slowing down the performance of business critical data applications or other live video communications such as Cisco TelePresence™ -- running simultaneously on the same network. This is another example of how the Cisco Borderless Networks architecture can support video and other applications securely and seamlessly, and how it can provide the highly secure reliability many IT departments require.
- As part of that integration, ECDS works together with Cisco WAAS for WAN optimization or functions as a standalone solution for video optimization. Customers can deploy Cisco WAAS alone for application acceleration and essential video scaling, or ECDS by itself if they are seeing significant video usage and immediate video scaling challenges. ECDS provides robust live and on-demand video support for formats such as Flash, H.264 and Windows Media, and allows IT leaders to both plan for video usage and handle unplanned demand for popular content.
- ECDS is available now globally; pricing starts at $4395 USD.
- Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com
