Cisco Arms Enterprises With Solution to Address Critical Challenges of Distributing Video

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Jul 7, 2011) - Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) 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.

Today, enterprise IT leaders are facing rapidly rising demands for video on already overloaded networks. ECDS provides 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.

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.

ANNOUNCEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• With Cisco ECDS, organizations can better use video to communicate to any user and reach more users anywhere on any device.

  • ECDS helps optimize live and on demand one-way video content for a variety of applications such as organizational communications, training, events or executive broadcasts.

  • IT managers can use ECDS to scale live video streaming without having to turn on multicast; for example, instead of sending 10 video streams of a broadcast to 10 users at a branch office, ECDS sends one stream to the branch and automatically splits that stream at the branch into one for each end user, thus providing better quality video and minimizing bandwidth consumption.

• ECDS adds intelligence to the network so content can be efficiently cached or prepositioned. On-demand video content, like employee training videos or recorded telepresence meetings, can be pushed out across the WAN during off-peak hours, and then cached locally for access by multiple users. With these capabilities, ECDS minimizes the network impact for frequently accessed video content, and helps eliminate delays in video download and playback.

• 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 helps improve the performance of Cisco collaboration and video applications such as Cisco Show and Share® for live and on demand video sharing and Cisco Digital Signage for high quality video to digital signs.

  • ECDS also supports third-party video applications and endpoints such as mobile devices or tablets.

  • ECDS works with other video infrastructure components of the Cisco medianet architecture like the Cisco MXE Media Experience Engines and Cisco TelePresence Content Server to provide a complete workflow from video content creation to management, delivery and sharing.

• ECDS is available now globally; pricing starts at $4395 USD.

Supporting Quotes
Alfredo Castañeda, global data network and telecommunications manager, Iberdrola
"As one of the global leading private energy companies, Iberdrola believes in the value of people and aims at creating a higher quality work environment. In support of this goal and increasing productivity for our company, Cisco's end-to-end video solution helped us effectively deliver training and executive communications across our employee base. As a core part of the medianet architecture, Cisco ECDS offers us a way to effectively scale our video delivery to all remote employees and supports our goals of high quality and reach for our communications."

Steven Reese, director of solutions marketing, Nexus IS
"Our customer was looking to offer high quality video-on-demand for students and teachers as a way to share knowledge. The Cisco Enterprise Content Delivery System proved to be the ideal solution to deploy video pervasively throughout the school district on their existing network infrastructure. We're excited that ECDS enables rich media experiences for our customers to take advantage of the power of both live and on-demand video streaming."

Janice Le Litvinoff, director and general manager, Digital Media Systems business unit, Cisco
"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."

Additional Resources:

• Enterprise Content Delivery System
• Cisco Media Delivery Engine 1100
• Cisco Media Delivery Engine 3100
• Cisco Media Delivery Engine 50WVB
• Cisco Business Video
• Enterprise Medianet solutions
• For more information about Cisco's collaboration news and activities, visit the Collaboration Blog or follow us via Twitter @CiscoDMS.

Technorati Tags:
Cisco, video, video delivery, enterprise video, bandwidth, ECDS, Enterprise Content Delivery System, Cisco MDE 1100, Cisco MDE 3100, Cisco MDE 50 VB, branch offices, WAN optimization, business video, streaming, on-demand video, Cisco WAAS, content, communications, medianet, video architecture

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