Cloud Based Infrastructure for

Next Generation TV
Technical Briefing - Video Storage and Processing Platform

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Copyright

© Ericsson AB 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be

reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Disclaimer

The contents of this document are subject to revision without notice due to
continued progress in methodology, design, and manufacturing. Ericsson shall
have no liability for any error or damage of any kind resulting from the use of
this document.

Trademark List

All trademarks are properties of their respective owners. A list of trademarks is

found in document Trademark Information, 006 51-CSH 150 090.

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1 Executive Summary
The features and experiences that subscribers demand today – TV Anywhere,
HD recordings, huge libraries – require operators to quickly and efficiently
deploy complex time and place shifted TV services. Traditional architectures
are costly, time consuming, and not very scalable or resilient. Challenges
include huge storage needs and costs, complex infrastructure and very high
performance throughput.

2 The Challenges
TV service providers are struggling to achieve or maintain their competitive
advantage with a few key next generation services such as time shifted TV,
Video on Demand (VOD) and cloud based DVR (cDVR). While each is slightly
different, the challenges for all of them are quite similar.

Putting an integrated infrastructure in place

With the shift towards TV everywhere, service providers need to understand

how they can have an integrated multi-platform VOD strategy covering
services to both legacy set-top boxes (STBs) as well as Over-the-Top (OTT).
They are expanding beyond the tradition TV platform into mobile devices,
gaming platforms like Xbox and even dongles such as Chromecast and
Sony’s SmartStick. Their legacy backends often need to be updated to keep
pace with new Content Management Systems, and Digital Rights Management
(DRM) and encoding schemes.

Keeping up with the OTTs

While time shifting is gaining popularity, on demand Pay TV content still only
makes up a tiny portion of over all TV viewing, with 23% of viewers ordering
only 1-3 VOD rentals each month. Instead subscribers more often watch VOD
content from OTT services like Netflix who are constantly expanding their on-
demand libraries. TV service providers must also expand their libraries to keep
up. This adds content library scaling to the list of challenges.

Consistently awesome experiences across all screens

Subscribers are interested in browsing and watching time shifted TV on a STB

or any connected device. This includes restarting a live program from the
beginning, navigating backward on the program guide to discover and watch
content that was broadcast earlier, or pausing live TV without a DVR. A
multiscreen solution must be put in place to handle this. If this viewing
experience on other devices is as a good as viewing on the primary TV
screen, screen size aside, subscribers will be more compelled to use
multiscreen services. In addition to on-demand or recorded programs, as
these new time shifted options gain in popularity and migrate to other devices,

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it will demand improvements in the quality of video processing, packaging and

distribution processes as well.

Leveraging the Cloud

Finally, traditional DVR’s are slowly migrating to the cloud as well in order to
bring recorded programing everywhere on all devices. This answers the
ongoing subscriber demands, while providing a technological competitive
advantage. CDVR eliminates storage needs in home set top boxes, reducing
cost for hardware, maintenance, and upgrades by reducing truck rolls. The
number of concurrent recordings and the amount of storage per subscriber
can be set on the fly. While deployment options vary regionally, they all face
scaling, storage, performance, and reliability challenges.

Storage

Storage is a multifaceted concern with time shifted and place shifted TV. As
recording archives, VOD libraries, number of channels and time shift buffers
increase; providers must be prepared to scale up quickly and efficiently. Sizing
systems is difficult given the number of variables, including the unpredictable
nature of some cDVR content. In some situations, service providers are
responding by migrating from a traditional VOD infrastructure to CDN
architecture. A CDN architecture enables more dynamic content caching
schemes and leverages modern Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) delivery protocols for
end-to-end multi-screen IP delivery. This allows providers to expand their
library and adaptively stream content to IP-enabled set top boxes, and mobile
devices, as well as legacy systems. The deployment flexibility created by a
CDN approach also permits a scale-out rollout into new markets as needed.

Beyond the basic scaling of content, a provider must also consider how
protecting these files might impact the scale of storage. In some situations
deduplication is a possibility and in others it is impossible due to copyright
laws. This overhead could greatly enlarge an already huge content library.

Figure 1: Video traffic in a triple-play network during busy hours

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Throughput Performance

Video traffic during peak hours is growingi, and the shift from multicast linear
TV to unicast VOD and cDVR content will create significant performance
challenges. Unicast requires a separate stream for every user, even if they are
streaming the same content. This is unlike multicast delivery, which reaches
hundreds of home with a single video stream. CDN World notes that 75% of
customers who receive poor quality IPTV service will either not return or will
seek out a different provider.ii In order to maintain an acceptable quality of
service, there must be sustained high performance during read and write.
Particularly with cDVR, this helps compensate for the potential 30-40%
recording concurrency at peak times, like prime time, or during popular
programs. Playout concurrency is also much higher than typical VOD
applications with cDVR typically spreading over a 72 hours window after the
recordings. Massive throughput is required due to the number of potential
parallel recordings

3 The Solution

3.1 Ericsson Video and Storage Processing Platform

The Ericsson Video and Storage Processing Platform offers a unique, proven
infrastructure, which allows for seamless augmentation and replacement of
legacy TV services with new cloud-based services. It integrates and virtualizes
the storage and processing capabilities of as many Commercial-Off-The-Shelf
(COTS) servers as needed, providing outstanding performance gains and
allowing operators to avoid many of the complexities and costs associated
with launching new services. Optimized for media, it’s ideal for time-shifted
services.

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Tremendously versatile, the platform enables multiple uses cases such as:
• Master Video Library
• Long tail server
• Scalable Origin server
• CDN Assist
• Enhanced VOD
• Cloud DVR

These new generation of video services are all primed to utilize the latest
technology advances in cloud computing and storage using IT infrastructure –
private or public clouds. Among the main advantages of utilizing such cloud
architecture for video service providers is the abstraction of the services tier
from the underpinning specialized video tier and generic IT infrastructure
(Compute/Storage/Networking) tier. The platform provides a software solution
that aggregates standard COTS servers into a massive grid of joint storage
and compute known as the cluster. The Ericsson Video and Storage
Processing Platform cluster provides a unified name-space for storage and a
single pool of compute resources on the same cluster using leading
virtualization stacks. The ability of the platform to turn standard servers into a
joint store and compute grid leads to unprecedented density in cloud data
centers, avoiding the usual bottlenecks between storage and compute clusters
through data locality, and facilitates scaling and management through a
unified grid management.

The platform contains two main software layers in order to create a video
private cloud using the converged storage/compute cloud architecture.

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3.2 Basic Architecture

The platform is comprised of servers (nodes) of multiple Data Attached
Storage (DAS) or Just a Bunch of Disks (JBODs) each running our software.
The foundation of the nodes is the storage. These nodes are clustered
together to form a pod, which in turn make up the grid. The software-based,
distributed file system is a true scale-out system. The dynamically allocated
read and write resources have no limit and provide very high throughput. It
also runs on any hardware, or combination of hardware. This allows you to
pick the right server configuration for the specific workload you have, and
removes shackles to any particular legacy hardware as you upgrade.

The grid management suite provides management, dynamic resource

balancing, and allocation within the scale-out storage and compute platform.
Proper server management software will guarantee the security and stability of
servers throughout its lifespan. The manager performs resource management
and balancing for the grid and acts as external interface to service providers
back office systems (Business management, Content management, Resource
management, etc.). It orchestrates and controls multiple server pods, with a
massive number of servers, within any number of flexible pod configurations.
The manager dynamically controls, in a real-time environment, the pod and
node load balancing in terms of storage capacity, processing capabilities,
ingest and streaming requirements.

In addition to managing the server pods, the manager communicates with the
back office infrastructure using multiple interfaces. These interfaces help the
manager to control content acquisition, session allocation, recording
scheduling, ad-insertion capabilities, key management, and other functions.

The nodes each have processing capabilities combined with storage devices
and are responsible for both storing and delivering data, the distributed file
system, and all storage related functions. When grouped together they form a
powerful pod, the basic logical block of the system. A pod represents a virtual
video server entity, which clusters together a number of nodes interconnected
within a LAN topology via the standard 1 GigE management and 10 GigE full
mesh interconnection networks.

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Each node can join live multicast streams for recording/ingest, stream all
popular formats, and support streaming legacy, current, and emerging
protocols.

3.3 Functionality

3.3.1 Media Recording and Ingest

The Ericsson Video Storage and Processing Platform provides scalable real-
time content ingest functionality for:
• VOD ingest
• Live channel ingest in the form of raw MPEG2-TS feeds

The Live media ingest connection is established using an IP multicast

streaming approach, when each channel encoder is connected to the platform
via a different IP multicast connection. The entire video ingest workflow is
triggered and managed by the Manager application. In the initial stage, the
Manager allocates the nodes to perform the actual ingest, assigns a session
and coordinates the communication parameters with the required source.

The following media ingest types are supported:

• Constant Bit Rate (CBR) ingest - Each CBR live channel or VOD file is
represented as a Single-Program Transport Stream (SPTS). The CBR
content is used for legacy streaming.
• Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) ingest - The ABR content for live channel or VOD
file is represented by multiple SPTS, one for each video layer with a
different bitrate. The ABR content targets OTT streaming purposes.

During the ingest process the following on the fly procedures occur:
• Video analyzing and creation of index file per each ingested SPTS
• Single index file for CBR and multiple index files for ABR (per each video
layer) are created
• Performing Video and TS level integrity check and errors detection
• Detection of SCTE-35 markers for seamless Ad-insertion and splicing
purposes

As a final point in the ingest process the content is segmented to small chunks
(~1MB) and dispersed across the entire cluster to provide better storage
capacity and ensure the highest reliability level and most advanced content
redundancy scheme. It is striped across multiple drives and nodes in the pod.
This ensures both high levels of available parallel IO and also perfect IO load
balancing across the entire storage cluster. The platform also implements a
unique scale-out, distributed file-system, which uses much less overhead for
data protection. Instead of replicating or even triplicating the data chunks,
Ericsson uses a distributed data protection scheme using either XOR parity
chunks for RAID5 like use cases and erasure codes for RAID6+ use cases.
This ensures both better capacity efficiency as well as read-write efficiency,
which is paramount for video application specifically on a large scale.

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3.3.2 Distributed File system

A key component of the software offering is a virtualized software-defined

storage (SDS), which resides in the infrastructure layer and includes a
distributed storage solution. The SDS aggregates local storage resources
available on servers and virtualizes them into a shared, policy driven, virtual
storage pool. This storage pool offers high IO performance, data durability and
high availability using advanced distributed data dispersion algorithms in
addition with a seamless fault tolerance and self-healing operations.

The SDS software stack provides:

• Aggregated IO performance from all sources (linear scalability)
• Distributed data protection model (distributed RAID)
• Fault-tolerance and high availability on the storage infrastructure layer
• On-the-fly provisioning of new storage resources
• Self-healing capabilities, including:
• Restripe - Rewrites files with new permutation, when scaling the
storage cluster with a new server and drives
• Rebuild - Recreates the files from failed drives
• Balance - Reconstructs decommissioned disk after it was replaced.
• Repair - Fixes holes/corrupted data chunks of a striped file
• Data Resiliency - Reconstructs missing segments of the requested
data according to the implemented RAID algorithm

3.3.3 Video Streaming

The Ericsson Video Storage and Processing Platform supports two main types
for content delivery and streaming:
• CBR streaming used by legacy systems in the Cable world
(IPTV/QAM STB’s).
• ABR streaming OTT (Wi Fi, 3G, 4G) for the subscribers’ companion
devices (PC, iOS, Android ant)

The main difference of the ABR streaming technique from the legacy CBR is
in the client device capabilities. In the ABR streaming, the video player has full
control on the streaming rate and dynamically adapts to any changes in the
streaming conditions. These devices are continuously detecting the access
bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of a video
stream accordingly by switching between different video profiles depending on
available resources. This approach promises a small video buffering, fast start
time and a very good overall user experience of ABR video streaming for both
high-end and low-end network connections.

3.3.4 Sliding Time Shift Buffer

In addition to the regular cloud DVR services, operators may opt to provide
advanced features such as “Catch-Up TV” library, “Start Over”, “Record in the
Past”, and additional features. These are operator-driven automatic recording
features.

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With a sliding time shift buffer, all live broadcast channels in the line-up are
automatically recorded, stored and made available for all subscribers for these
time shifted Services during a predefined time-based sliding window called
Time Shift Buffer (TSB). The TSB can be managed either with Electronic
Program Guide (EPG) awareness or without it using the time segment
approach.

For the EPG aware TSB, the external content management system will
request to record and store the entire channel lineup for defined number of
hours/days, which will create the linear circular TSB on any desired time
window size. Using this mode the deletion of the content is managed by the
content management system.

In the case of time segment approach, the manager will maintain a linear TSB
using a time shift buffer implementation, where the stored data in the time shift
buffer represents a sliding window of time with fixed sized recorded segments.
This window can be configured on a per channel basis and the system will
keep adding data to the head of the buffer and removing old data from the tail
of the buffer.

3.3.5 Diagnostics Suite

Given the complexity of this infrastructure, we provide a centralized, multi-

functional suite for monitoring and diagnosing the entire platform in the
production environments. It proactively collects and extracts data to diagnose
errors and identify failures. It enables deep system-level and service-level
analytics of the system by maintaining constant monitoring, control, and
inspection.

By conducting deep level diagnostics it keeps operational staff constantly

updated and informed of the system's health and performance, and assists in
conducting a deep business level analysis to recognize market trends using
comprehensive reporting tools.

On the functional plane, the diagnostics suite offers the following monitoring,
diagnostics and analytics capabilities, and interfaces:
• Real-time monitoring and alerting on system health metrics and service
performance KPI’s
• Dashboards - visualization (graphs) of system health and performance
over time
• Offline reports – system and service level performance monitoring and
business level analysis

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3.4 Use Cases

3.4.1 Cloud DVR

The Cloud DVR (cDVR) application enables TV service providers to offer a

DVR service without the need to deploy storage at the subscriber site. By
moving the storage and recording upstream to the network operation center,
or even a public cloud, and running a cDVR client software at the subscriber
site, operators can offer a full DVR service without the need to upgrade
subscriber hardware. There are multiple deployment options, including private
copy, shared copy, and a mix of the two.

3.4.1.1 Private Copy

In private copy, a dedicated recording copy is created and stored

for each unique subscriber. This means that even if multiple
subscribers request to record the same program, each and
every subscriber will have a separate stored recording.

Generally, these deployments create a large impact on

the storage capacity of the cluster, since the recorded
content is unique per subscriber, requiring significantly
more storage capacity.

In addition, due to the unchangeable nature of the individual content, the

streaming throughput and bandwidth consumption requirements of the cluster
increase as the number of subscribers grow and require more recording and
streaming concurrency usage patterns.

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3.4.1.2 Shared Copy

The main differentiator to private copy deployment is that the

shared-copy scheme assumes a single/shared copy of each
recording, which serves all subscribers that requested to
record the same program. All subscribers that request to
record the same program are assigned with a ‘reference’
and share the same physical recorded asset.

This method can be referred to as a many-to-one relationship and is known as

a “shared-copy”. The main advantage of this method is high capacity
efficiency, due to significantly lower footprint on the storage capacity than the
“private-copy” mode.

In addition, the cacheable nature of the “shared-copy” content allows the

deployments to leverage the CDN distributed approach and caching
capabilities. This significantly reduces the impact on the centralized cluster in
terms of streaming requirements while providing high throughput streaming of
the most popular cached content in a low latency from a close proximity to the
subscribers.

3.4.2 Enhanced VOD

Although available for over a decade, VOD usage has just begun to gain
momentum in the last few years. Having overcome the clunky interfaces and
initial monetization concerns, set-top box VOD availability has almost doubled
since 2008.

Accommodating this exponential growth requires service providers to rapidly

expand their VOD solutions. This creates challenges. In addition to the
ongoing licensing issues, there are infrastructure concerns that arise as you
expand. Current solutions tend to fall short in the three key capabilities needed
to deliver the video content people want, where and when it’s wanted. These
factors – performance, flexibility, and scale – are all addressed with the
Ericsson suite of enhanced VOD offerings.

3.4.2.1 CDN Assist

Service providers that chose to migrate from a traditional VOD infrastructure to

a CDN architecture gain more dynamic content caching schemes and
leverage modern Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) delivery protocols for end-to-end
multi-screen IP delivery. Ericsson provides a unified CDN assist solution
allowing MSOs to expand their library and adaptively stream content to IP-
enabled set top boxes, and mobile devices, as well as legacy systems.
Benefits include:
• Unified delivery infrastructure: CDN delivers all content to all devices
• Streaming to legacy set tops from the CDN
• Backwards compatibility: No changes required on the legacy set tops
• Support of leading session management and UDP streaming/stream
control protocols

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3.4.2.2 Dynamic Origin Server

The dynamic origin server includes high performance scale-out storage with
an integrated media framework that allows the storage nodes to perform live
ingest, processing, and delivery. Processing is performed on the storage
servers eliminating the need for external server farms and decreasing
networking complexity. Providers can add servers as needed, leverage the
hardware agnostic benefit of the platform, and simplify the infrastructure even
at a very large scale.

Media Workflow Framework Components:

• Ingest processor
• Parallel transcoding engine
• Ad insertion
• Content delivery engine

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3.4.3 Master Video Library (MVL)

The MVL is scale out storage providing the ability to ingest, process and
ubiquitously stream master or “gold copies’ of licensed content. The MVL is
the logical component that can run on the same or separated infrastructure
with the VSPP Origin. The MVL is deployed as a scale-out NAS, providing the
ability to interface to different content providers and fetch the content as well
as providing the associated content processing workflow. The content is
acquired into the MVL using the TCP acceleration protocols (e.g. FTP, CIFS).
The fetched content can be optionally transcoded, pre-packaged and pre-
encrypted.

3.4.4 Long Tail Server

Consumers are constantly demanding deeper video offerings. As the demand

for content becomes more diversified, the classic caching model with small
libraries and high stream count does not apply. As video service providers
deploy large storage vaults it becomes cost prohibitive to cache the entire
library at the network edge.

The Long Tail Server allows operators to store and deliver less popular, or
long tail, content directly from a large, central storage vault, eliminating the
need to replicate entire libraries at the edge of the network.

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3.5 Key Benefits

Time shifted TV is often a complex deployment. Every deployment is unique
with its own challenges and characteristics. At Ericsson, we make these
solutions simpler. The platform offers greater flexibility and can scale-out to
support hundreds of petabytes of video storage as well as massive amounts of
concurrent recordings and playouts. This disruptive technology is not only cost
efficient, secure, field proven and flexible but its performance is unmatched.

3.5.1.1 Simplification

In order to truly simplify time shifted-TV architecture, we’ve eliminated the

individual processing server farms and integrated the storage and the
processing into a single namespace. This reduces interconnect complexities,
and is much simpler to manage. All of this greatly improves performance.

The integrated media workflow framework includes

• Media Ingest / Recording
• Media transcoding
• Ad insertion
• Packaging
• Encryption
• Media delivery (streaming)

3.5.1.2 Flexibility

In addition to fully heterogeneous support of any mix of x86 generic servers,

the platform easily integrates into back office systems. Service providers get
the freedom to configure the hardware to match their workload, with no vendor
lock in.

It supports most Digital Rights Management (DRM), Content Management

Systems (CMS), and Session Resource Management (SRM) applications.

Each server in the cluster can:

• Perform encryption
• Support stream control (legacy STBs LSCP, RTSP)
• Stream video (all popular formats supported - UDP, ABR etc.)
• Provide Just in time Packaging

3.5.1.3 Scalability

For all next generation TV applications, scalability and capacity efficiency is

critical. This performance cannot be affordably achieved using common
storage and streaming server architectures. At scale, it would create a very
complex and expensive infrastructure. The Ericsson platform scales linearly:
• Plug and play expansion
• Single namespace simplicity
• Increases simultaneous streaming capacity with innovative video striping

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3.5.1.4 Cost Effective at Massive Scale

The Ericsson Video Storage and Performance Platform leverages several

elements to enable a cost effective deployment of time-shifted TV services.
First, the platform is hardware agnostic. Operators are free to choose their own
generic x86 servers, even changing brands along the way, and can be
confident that Ericsson will provide heterogeneous support. This eliminates
the need for expensive appliances or vendor lock-in.

Second, by integrating compute and storage into the same stack, packaging,
transcoding, streaming, and ad insertion are all integrated. In fact, the stack is
optimized for media workflow. There is no need for “silos” or a dedicated stack
for streaming, one for encoding, etc. This dramatically reduces the server
requirements and in turn OPEX. The platform reduces server needs by 40%
compared to a classic configuration as processing and storage are integrated,
which eliminates all the extra server farms.

Most importantly, you can recoup the cost for the storage and recording
infrastructure within 10 months. In general, a standard subscription fee can
cover the hardware and software costs.

3.5.1.5 Peak Performance – Always

The characteristics and nuances of video have been carefully considered. For
both read and write, we sustain very high recording and playout concurrency.
This helps compensate for the potential 30-40% recording concurrency at
peak times, like prime time, or during popular programs. Playout concurrency
in cDVR is also much higher than typical VOD applications typically spread
over a 72 hours window after the recordings.

3.5.1.6 Solid Reliability

The high availability and resiliency of the product greatly benefits advanced
TV services. Content is striped across the entire cluster with “Cross-Server”
RAID parity at the application level. This makes the system resilient against
both disk AND server failure and allows for service continuity during
maintenance.

It is a tremendously durable solution. Put simply, the videos recorded will

always be available, always, and immediately. We also provide high quality of
service with very low latency ensuring the viewer will get instant reaction to all
requests (stop, play, and pause) with a good quality stream. The platform is
built for continuous operations:
• Redundancy without duplication requirements
• Hands-off maintenance
• Auto recovery, fast rebuild
• 100% resilience
• No downtime for updates, h/w replacement
• Distributed RAID
• Comprehensive diagnostics suite

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4 Conclusion

4.1 Why Ericsson

The Ericsson Video and Storage Platform powers over 60% of the cloud DVR
systems deployed today, including over two years running in a private copy
per user cDVR commercial deployment. Our solution places us at the forefront
of technology capability and performance, with proven deployments at the
most demanding customers totaling over 150 petabytes of storage capacity.

5 Contact Ericsson
To understand more about how Ericsson’s Video Storage and Processing
Platform, the Cloud DVR Solution and its broader portfolio can help you meet
your subscribers’ demands and differentiate your offerings, contact your local
Ericsson office.
http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/tv_sales_and_support_contacts

i
Source: Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs 2012

ii
Source: CDN World Forum, London 2012

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