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Solution Brief

Cisco Unified Computing System and Signiant File Transfer Solutions: Accelerate and Secure Content Exchange Around the World What You Will Learn Organizations in many industries—especially media and entertainment companies—need to quickly and securely transfer large content and metadata files to users, systems, and applications. And they need to transfer these files anywhere in the world at any time of the day or night. Cisco and Signiant together offer an agile, high-performance file transfer platform. This solution:

● Facilitates efficient, timely delivery of content across geographic regions, including content ingest from multiple content providers

● Confirms the secure exchange of large files

● Supports automation of workflows and notifications

● Can be deployed, scaled, and centrally managed at a low total cost of ownership (TCO)

This combined solution uses the Cisco Unified Computing SystemP

™P (Cisco UCS®) and Signiant file transfer

software.

Challenge of Moving Large Media Files Across the WAN Today, everyone wants content fast, wherever they are. No one knows that better than distribution teams who are responsible for secure and effective sharing of massive video and other media files. For example, these teams are responsible for:

● International distribution of television content to broadcast, media services, over-the-top (OTT) content, mobile, electronic sell-through (EST), and video on demand (VoD) providers

● Distribution of final-form television content to geographically dispersed media operations centers

● Collaborative creative processes, such as distributed editing, foreign market localization, special effects, and game and promotion development

● Accelerated movement of large media files for rendering, transcoding, or archiving

Traditional transport models required physical hard drive delivery or satellite transfer, which are expensive and slow processes that are difficult to coordinate. As an alternative, many organizations have implemented some form of FTP, because it can move large files and is a well-known, free protocol. But FTP is insufficient. It doesn’t effectively deliver the speed, reliability, security, automation support, notifications, and user and storage management that these businesses demand.

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Cisco UCS with Signiant Manager+Agents and Signiant Media Shuttle The Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Server in combination with Signiant Manager+Agents™ or Signiant Media Shuttle™ offers support for fast content and metadata file exchanges between users, systems, and applications regardless of geographic location or file size. Agents installed on the sending and receiving ends manage and track content movement and provide file delivery confirmation.

The solution includes the Cisco UCS rack server and Signiant software for central management, agents, secure media exchange, and relay agents.

Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Server The C240 M4 is well-suited for large-file transfer and storage. This enterprise-class server delivers exceptional performance, expandability, and efficiency for storage and I/O-intensive infrastructure workloads, including big data analytics, virtualization, and graphics-rich and bare-metal applications.

Signiant Managers and Agents The Manager+Agents Manager software is responsible for central management (Figure 1). It performs all administration, control, and reporting of system activity. It also orchestrates the processing of jobs.

Figure 1. Signiant Manager+Agents Manager Software

● Managers: Signiant manager software performs all administration, control, and reporting of system activity. It also orchestrates the processing of jobs. Users interact with the manager through a web-based interface for system administration and configuration and to establish jobs, automate tasks, and manage current system activity and reporting.

● Agents: Installed on remote servers, Signiant agent software is responsible for file movement, notifications, and interoperability with third-party software and systems. Files are moved from agent to agent, and the agent software can be deployed as a single node or as a load-balanced cluster.

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Signiant Media Shuttle Media Shuttle is a hybrid software-as-a-service (SaaS) file-sharing solution that can be included in a scalable enterprise configuration or used as a standalone server for smaller collaborative projects. It has a simple user interface, making file sending, sharing, and submission so intuitive that Media Shuttle users will not need a tutorial, training session, or even an email explanation. There are no file-size limits, reporting and auditing is centralized, and all content can be stored on the internal network for high security. A SaaS-based offering coupled with Cisco UCS can provide a secure environment that can be centrally managed and offered to various distributed and global departmental users or through partners for collaboration.

How the Solution Works The solution starts with Cisco UCS, the first data center platform to integrate servers, networking, storage access, and virtualization resources into a single unified system. When you deploy Cisco UCS, you establish the system’s whole infrastructure, so the addition of more servers and chassis doesn’t require any complex cabling or any other networking components—which radically simplifies production environments.

Cisco UCS Manager Cisco UCS Manager makes the system self-aware and self-integrating. When you plug a component into Cisco UCS, it is automatically discovered. Server identity, configuration, and connectivity are abstracted into Cisco UCS service profiles. Associating a service profile with a physical server sets more than 100 configuration variables, all with zero touch. In addition, the system can be set up with resource pools that automatically discover and configure new servers as they are inserted into the blade server chassis, automating deployment. In the event of a server failure, a new server can be configured to take on the failed server’s identity in minutes.

Signiant Managers+Agents Managers+Agents integrates with existing IT infrastructure, media technology, and file-based workflows to enable highly efficient, media-aware networks. Unlike custom-scripted FTP jobs that cannot scale, Managers+Agents provides a powerful solution for professionals in broadcast engineering, IT, and media infrastructure management for more sophisticated management, automation, security, and control of media delivery processes. Figure 2 shows a typical deployment.

Figure 2. Signiant Manager+Agents Example

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In addition, organizations can use file sharing with Media Shuttle. It uses the same security and file acceleration technology as Managers+Agents, but provides a customer-branded user interface delivered from the cloud, requires little IT support, and delegates user administration to media operations personnel.

Signiant Media Shuttle Media Shuttle provides a simple user interface for file sending, sharing, and submission for a number of applications (Figure 3). It is so intuitive that users will need no training. And whereas other solutions typically cannot effectively support files larger than 1 GB, Media Shuttle allows you to send files of any size. It also provides built-in acceleration using Signiant’s powerful technology platform. It includes User Datagram Protocol (UDP) acceleration, which materially speeds up file transfers (transferring files up to 200 times faster than with FTP) by increasing the network pipe. Media Shuttle also is highly reliable. With checkpoint restart, if any interruption occurs in your file transfer, the transfer will be automatically restarted, so your files will never get stuck en route.

Figure 3. Media Shuttle Applications

Benefits Cisco UCS with Manager+Agents or Media Shuttle provides a scalable computing environment and the capability to support multiple instances of Signiant software to address the largest file-based aggregation and distribution needs of media companies. This solution enables large media files and data sets to be shared with or delivered to collaborative creative teams, publishing systems, and applications using a secure, accelerated file transfer capability. The solution offers organizations the capability to:

● Move large files at speeds up to 200 times faster than TCP without being impeded by network latency or packet loss (Figure 4)

● Confirm delivery with robust flow and error-correction protocols

● Improve agility and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)

● Deploy, manage, and scale your deployment easily, allowing more time and resources to focus on strategic business opportunities

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The combination of Cisco and Signiant provides a centrally managed server and software environment that provides the high degree of flexibility necessary to respond quickly to complex aggregation and distribution needs without requiring additional management overhead and complexity.

Figure 4. Move Large Files at Speeds Up to 200 Times Faster Than with TCP

Conclusion Organizations in the media and entertainment industries as well as other markets are challenged to quickly and easily transfer content and metadata files to users, systems, and applications around the world at any time of the day or night. Cisco and Signiant offer a solution that allows efficient, fast delivery and sharing of large content files around the world in an accelerated and secure fashion.

For More Information For additional information about the Cisco® and Signiant solution, see:

● http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c240-m4-rack-server/datasheet-c78-732455.html

● http://www.signiant.com/products/signiant-manager/#why-you-need-manageragents

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