Medianet on Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches: An Intelligent Campus Network Optimized for Rich Media

2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

At-A-Glance

Why Medianet?Organizations are increasingly adopting new business video and collaboration technologies. These applications pose different demands in the network. This makes delivery and the quality of media unpredictable and increasingly complex for network operators and managers.

Medianet is what Cisco recommends as a best-practice architecture for video and collaboration deployments, helping address these challenges, simplifying, lowering risks, cutting costs, and improving the quality of video and collaboration deployments.

What is the Value of Medianet?By 2014 global online video traffic is estimated to grow to be six times greater than in 2009. Video is becoming an increasingly important means of business communication, providing more personal and effective collaboration and delivering a vehicle to encourage business innovations.

Video will not remain only on the desktop in the corporate office: the Cisco Visual Networking Index predicts that nearly 90 percent of the worlds consumer traffic will be some form of video by 2014 (the highest growth rate of any application category measured within the Cisco VNI forecast at this time). The annual global IP traffic will reach almost three-fourths of a zettabyte (equivalent to more than 180 billion DVDs). (See Figure 1.)

Following an architectural approach to video traffic deployment with Cisco Medianet helps organizations deal with video traffic growth challenges, by simplifying the task of rich media traffic management and improving the effectiveness and reliability of video and collaboration applications.

Figure 1. Video Traffic Growth Trend

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What Are the Benefits of Medianet?Medianet has built-in intelligence to address the unique challenges of video and rich media by providing:

Reduced operational costs

- Simplified installation and management of video endpoints

- Faster troubleshooting for voice, data, and video applications

At-A-Glance

2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

Ability to perform a predeployment assessment of the effects of video, voice, and data in a network in order to increase the confidence of network and application operators

Service-level agreement (SLA) assurance and performance monitoring: Provides the ability to simulate traffic flows and gather primary metrics for performance analysis

Ability to differentiate business-critical applications, determine the importance of a session based on its business value, and provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS)

Faster end-user adoption of rich-media applications through a simplified user experience

Video Deployments with Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series SwitchesThe predecessors of the Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches, the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches, have been used in numerous types of deployments centered around voice and video applications: broadcast studio networks (for example, those used in the recent Vancouver and London Olympics, which combined the use of Layer 3 multicast traffic in a redundant network design based on virtual switching system [VSS] technology), airports (where Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS] and multicast VPN with extranet technologies have been employed), hospitals (utilizing the VSS technology with advanced QoS capabilities to provide real-time communication), and more.

The Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series follows in those footsteps and brings current and new features to higher levels of performance and scalability. It provides network designers with a wealth of tools customized to video deployments, such as:

Advanced QoS capabilities for video traffic prioritization in order to minimize traffic loss caused by congestion (with up to eight queues, multiple traffic thresholds, up to 256K QoS ternary content-addressable memory [TCAM] entries for extremely granular QoS policies, and so on). Figure 2 shows a typical granular mapping scheme of differentiated services code point (DSCP) levels to multiple queues and thresholds. With this scheme, for example, its possible to differentiate multiple classes of traffic such as voice over IP (VoIP), broadcast video, real-time interactive, multimedia conferencing, streaming, network control, transactional data, best effort, and so on. In addition, the hardware is capable of supporting dual priority queues, with priority queue 1 having a higher priority than priority queue 2. This can be useful when two classes of traffic are extremely latency sensitive and require strict priority treatment, with class 1 having higher priority than class 2 (for example high quality high definition voice and video traffic in a congested environment).

Figure 2. An Egress Queuing Example Model

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Autoconfiguration features such as AutoQoS, which supports template-based global QoS configuration for easier and faster QoS deployment. These features help to reduce time and cost involved in switch deployment, while enabling a more effective and specific configuration of the network devices based on the needs of the connected end devices and of the user applications.

Medianet flow metadata generation and consumption capabilities to share consistent flow definition data across multiple network elements so as to uniquely identify a flow and easily apply QoS policies to it. This enables the user to differentiate business-critical applications end to end and to determine the importance of a session based on its business value so that the network can consistently provide service assurance and optimal user experience.

Support for high-performance multicast traffic forwarding and advance multicast protocols (such as PIM SSM and Bidirectional PIM) to enable multicast services when one-to-many or many-to-many communication is required.

Support for wire-rate Flexible NetFlow statistics collection in hardware to provide deep visibility into all the traffic traversing the switch and in particular into both unicast and multicast video flows that are forwarded by the switch. Statistics for replicated packets of multicast video flows are also maintained thanks to egress NetFlow collection.

2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R) C45-728263-01 06/13

At-A-Glance

Performance monitoring analytics (Cisco Performance Monitor) to identify and troubleshoot problems associated with video flow forwarding (such as packet loss, excessive delay, abnormal jitter, and so on). This capability enhances visibility into the network to generate baselines, simplify planning, and accelerate troubleshooting of video, voice, and data applications. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Cisco Performance Monitor: Analytics for Troubleshooting of Video Traffic

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Cisco Mediatrace capabilities to monitor the nodes along a specific video flow path and to collect hop-by-hop statistics about that flow. This allows the network administrator to trace the hop-by-hop handling of rich-media flows end to end so as to assess the effects of video, voice, and data in the network and enhance capacity planning.

Why Cisco?Some vendors focus on the applications only, which limits their ability to use network intelligence and react to unforeseen network degradation, whereas other vendors focus on the network only and miss opportunities to perform advanced services because of limited visibility into the applications.

The Cisco competitive differentiation comes from its unique ability to tightly integrate rich-media applications and intelligent network services through advanced video features. This integration between applications and network provides superior visibility, dynamic troubleshooting, and the ability to protect business-critical traffic.

The highly scalable and highly flexible Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series offers users a wealth of advanced features customized to video deployments that can greatly simplify both the task of the network designer to plan for reach media traffic deployment and the task of the network administrator to analyze voice, video and data traffic and resolve issues that might arise in a production network.

For More Informationwww.cisco.com/go/6800

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