SUPPORTING THE WINTER GAMES www.aristanetworks.com

customer case study

Data Center Class Global HD Streaming

INSIDE

SUBJECTDesigning and building the next generation of cloud-based streaming media origination services supporting the world’s premier winter sports event had unprecedented requirements for automation, throughput, advertisement insertion, and reliability

WHYWith millions of worldwide viewers including athletes families who couldn’t afford to travel, iStreamPlanet brought the Olympic games into every connected household.

WHO SHOULD CAREAnyone building out corporate or media related streaming media services who wants to scale to automating all programming, provisioning and delivery while maximizing the reliability and throughput of their content delivery.

iStreamPlanet Deploys Arista Networks Technologies for XXI Olympic Winter GamesiStreamPlanet® develops and provides digital media strategy, managed webcasting services, and Rich Internet Applications. The company successfully integrates managed services and SaaS-based digital media applications that cover all aspects of media delivery, enabling enterprises and other content owners to distribute and monetize their digital media across multiple platforms.

iStreamPlanet’s team of digital media and broadcast experts has managed and enabled the deployment of more than 1,000 large live events viewed online by millions, including the Presidential Inauguration and the Michael Jackson Memorial. The world’s top business leaders (American Express, AT&T, Caterpillar, Microsoft), trendiest music festivals (Bonnaroo, Coachella, SXSW), most popular sporting events (Masters Golf Tournament, Championships at Wimbledon, Sunday Night Football) and major broadcasters (CBS Television,

Cablevision, Fox International, NBC) rely on iStreamPlanet’s digital media solutions.

BUSINESS CHALLENGEOver the course of seventeen days, on behalf of NBCOlympics.com iStreamPlanet needed to stream 834 events and 4,483 hours of high-de!nition Winter Olympics video to millions of demanding fans around the world with maximum uptime. Any dropped packets over the course of billions of user viewed minutes would have resulted in a delay, retransmission, or garbled image for every viewer of the near-live stream.

To achieve this seemingly unattainable challenge, iStreamPlanet utilized the only networking infrastructure up to the task: Arista 7048 switches. The results speak for themselves in zero dropped packets, 100% user satisfaction, and a tremendous success for iStreamPlanet’s client, NBCOlympics.com.

"When we built the cloud-based streaming media origination for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in

SUPPORTING THE WINTER GAMES www.aristanetworks.com

two weeks we needed responsive partners with best-in-class technology," stated Mio Babic, chief executive officer of iStreamPlanet. "Arista delivered. We made our deadline and then streamed 834 events and 4,483 hours of content in 17 days through Arista switches with packet buffering architectures purpose-built for large-scale streaming and storage."

SOLUTIONiStreamPlanet chose Arista Network’s line of network switches to transfer petabytes of data between servers and customers over the Internet, located all over the world. Arista Network’s 7048 switches were chosen due to their high availability, large buffers for prevention of packet drops and ability to sustain high throughput.

At the core of the network, iStreamplanet utilized Arista’s line of 7048 switches for data transfer duties connected to two redundant racks of 23 Dell R710 servers running multiple Intel Gigabit Ethernet NICs teamed to get 2Gbps throughput per server. Arista Networks provided the Ethernet network to interconnect the streaming servers which require high-performance 1/10Gb switches with very large packet buffering. This is perfectly suited to supporting high-bandwidth video streaming and storage interconnection while maintaining the highest levels of system availability with both device and system level resiliency designed into the iStreamPlanet infrastructure. As reliability and resilience is important Arista EOS with In-

Service Software Upgrades and Stateful Fault Repair proved invaluable in maintaining service level agreements and overall uptime.

“With hundreds and hundreds of highlights and more than 1,000 hours of HD-quality video content delivered in 17 days, NBCOlympics.com depends on a fast, efficient, and utterly stable delivery system,” says Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President, Digital Media, NBC Sports & Olympics. “Olympic fans know that NBCOlympics.com is the only destination for every moment of the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games and we couldn’t do it without partners like iStreamPlanet, Switch, Intel, Arista and Juniper.”

RESULTSiStreamPlanet’s network for the Olympics live stream was brought online in only 12 days. iStreamPlanet successfully transferred over four petabytes of data over 17 days to millions of users all over the world. This event set the bar for streaming media automation, next-generation origination services, and network capabilities for streaming media delivery.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

To !nd out more about Arista Networks, go to www.aristanetworks.com.

To !nd out more about iStreamPlanet, go to www.istreamplanet.com.