Magic Images, a video special effects company, began operations in a metro-politan area with many advertising firms, which it interconnected with an ATM 100 Chapter 3
Table 3.7 Summary of Provider Requirements for Design and Dig
Address space Provider-assigned Individual sites have /22.
Provider will aggregate to /20 and advertise to multiple points of connection to Internet.
Name and address Backup to customer
management DNS
Outsourced VPN management
L1/2 connectivity Primary Multiple T1 or faster to primary POP InMux?
Backup Multiple T1 or faster to
secondary POP InMux?
Routing Advertise preferred routes requirements to primary POP, less preferred
backups to secondary POP Accept explicit routes to intranet and extranet locations;
otherwise default
Midbox Performance-enhancing requirements web cache
Firewall Provider-operated and
redundant.
KEY TO THE SOLUTION
The client is most concerned with availability. They will have growing require-ments for VPNs, and, given their potentially graphics-intensive business, are apt to grow significantly in bandwidth requirements. They do not want to manage the details of their network and prefer to work with a single service provider.
network. Prior to the firm offering this service, production studios had to send disks by motorcycle courier to the special effects house, pausing production while the special effects work was done.
Production studio time is expensive, but it is even more expensive to split up the production of a graphics-intensive commercial into several pieces that end whenever material is sent to the video specialist. Splitting the work would involve charges for setting up and tearing down the studio for each time seg-ment. It is generally more cost-effective to let the actors enjoy the very plush buffet while video production progresses.
Avoiding the 15- to 30-minute courier delay was immediately attractive.
When both the courier delay and the delays associated with copying material to removable storage disappeared, directors often gained even more efficiency, because it became convenient to have special events work done on much smaller pieces of work.
Broadcast-quality video is extremely graphics-intensive. The initial band-width between the studios and the special effects houses was at OC-3 (155 Mbps), but it was very clear that bandwidth requirements would continue to increase. Directors often wanted to send the output of multiple cameras, and send it at higher-than-broadcast-quality resolution. These OC-3 links provided ATM virtual circuits, not IP routing, and needed substantial manual provision-ing. Given that multiple studios fed into the main special effects facility, the link from the local provider to the switch at the main facility was OC-12.
The service saw potentially contradictory issues in its growth. First, it was very clear that it could use all the bandwidth it could get. Second, the industry in its area did not work around the clock, but there were other potential con-centrations of customers—California’s Hollywood, India’s Bollywood (Ramoji Film City, near Hyderabad), New York’s Madison Avenue, Tokyo’s animation studios, and Toronto’s television production—around the world, in different time zones. Because Magic Images knew how to implement an ATM layer 2 net-work, it cloned its environment to the other major cities, with an OC-12 to each, adding OC-12 links to the main site (see Figure 3.8). With a worldwide network, very expensive video production equipment could be used around the clock. It was probably reasonable to put certain services in each major city, and for each city to have its own set of workstations. Not having to duplicate the most expensive equipment could tremendously reduce costs, as long as the long-haul bandwidth cost did not remove the profits.
Some of Magic Images’ clients collaborate with one another as well as with Magic Images. Magic Images has set up LAN emulation systems for these trust relationships, as shown in Table 3.8. Note that a studio, such as LA-2, can belong to more than one cooperative group. Group 4 involves collaboration with competitors of Magic Images, who do not have Magic Images’ networking skills but have unique video processing capability. Magic Images may have a
Services, Service Level Agreements, and Delivering Service 101
business opportunity to provide communications outsourcing to its production competitors for which communications is not a core competence.
In the long term, Magic Images actually needs several kinds of worldwide networks (see Figure 3.9). It needs Internet connectivity to advertise its ser-vices. It needs an intranet to coordinate the use of its own resources. We will refer to the address space used for the intranet as VPN1. (See the discussion of VPNs in the next chapter.) Both at its own site and at customer facilities, Magic Images will not replace its ATM equipment overnight. There must be a transi-tional period where both ATM and Ethernet interfaces are supported (see Fig-ure 3.10). Magic Images can, however, take advantage of new-generation optical switching in the metropolitan and long-haul environments.
A variety of security concerns affect Magic Images. It operates its own fire-wall at the main site for its general Internet traffic, but conventional firefire-walls would have difficulty operating at the graphic application speeds, and in any case may be more general than what the quite specific applications need. One way of accomplishing the security goals for video may be to have multiple 102 Chapter 3
Table 3.8 Studio Groupings
Group 1 NY-1, LA-2, TO-3, LO-1
Group 2 LA-1, LA-2, TO-1
Group 3 BL-1, TK-1, LO-4
Group 4 LO-2, NY-2, Demonic, Angelic
SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE
ATM Switch
Figure 3.8 Current network of Magic Images.
address families within the overall VPN architecture—essentially having multi-ple independent extranets within the structure. For purposes of this exammulti-ple, we will assume that VPN1 is the intranet, that VPN2 through VPN4 correspond to groups 1 through 3, that VPN5 is the potential offering to Demonic and Angelic, and that individual VPNs can be set up for the individual studios that simply want to communicate with Magic Images.
For the provider, the immediate concerns are providing large bandwidth, with lots of capacity for growth, in metro areas and between metro areas. Short-reach/metro optical systems may be justified very early in the process. For long-haul operations, the firm might lease high-bandwidth links and operate its own routers, or may collaborate in provider-operated broadband video services. While security is indeed a concern, encryption hardware that operates at these high speeds may be prohibitively expensive. Television scrambling schemes do not have the overhead of strong encryption systems such as IPSec with triple Data Encryption Standard (DES), generally the industry standard for financial data.
Table 3.9 summarizes Magic Images’ requirements.
Services, Service Level Agreements, and Delivering Service 103
SFE
OC-12 OC-3
GE
SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE
See Site Detail
Metro Lambda and Bandwidth
Provider
International Lambda and Bandwidth Provider NY IP/ATM
WDM with 1 or more lambdas
Studio BL-3
Studio TO-1
Legend for Figures 3.8 and 3.9
Figure 3.9 Future network of Magic Images.
104 Chapter 3
SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE SFE
ATM Switches GE Switches
Redundant Routers
SFE
OC-12 OC-3
GE
WDM with 1 or more lambdas
10GE L e g e n d
Figure 3.10 New main site of Magic Images.
KEY TO THE SOLUTION
It’s going to be hard, in the long term and assuming success, for this firm to have too much bandwidth. Aggressive movement to fairly bleeding-edge optical technology is appropriate.