cisco_cisco 26/02/2015 10:24 Page 1
e decided our first question
for Yvette Kanouff, the
senior vice president service
provider video software and solutions
for Cisco, should be the obvious one;
what is virtualisation?
W
Advanced Television talked to Yvette Kanouff of
Cisco about all things cloud, virtualisation and the
latest iteration of Videoscape.
performance,’ and alongside that ‘here’s how
easy our orchestration works.’ I know that’s a
lot, but it is actually a really neat transition
from today to tomorrow.”
“We would like to
see transition in the
whole service provider
space but obviously
we’re not going to
change traditional
headends into
processing facilities
overnight. The service
provider is quite rightly
focussed on longevity of
equipment and the timeline
of capex – we have to be very
our service providers build a cloud
infrastructure that means a world-wide
interconnected cloud, a cloud federation for
shared resources; so it’s a whole new model of
the way we look at
service providers and
our partnership with
them.”
“So, where is the
CPE in all this? You still
need CPE of some kind,
but we used to build a lot of software on the
CPE device so you had this fat layer where we
did all the processing in the home. Now we
are taking that software and slowly moving it
into the cloud, so parental control, for
instance, moves to the cloud where there is
more intelligence and cross correlation of
what parental control means and so we can
offer more but also richer services. And in the
set-top I have less memory constraints so I
can focus on the features more. It doesn’t
mean we can dispense with the STB; for
example there are hundreds of TV varieties,
so without a provider’s box I have to start
adding software back to do translation work
to each of these devices. So I still create the
common hardware platform – be it an STB or
a dongle or a home gateway, but most of the
software is in the cloud.”
“Of course, with gateways we have the
whole new opportunity of the Smart Home
for the service provider. From Cisco’s
perspective, we look at different levels of
involvement, from creating a network in the
home that allows you good solid connectivity,
to things like intelligent bandwidth
management and then on top of that you
have the services you can add like remote
control of security, energy management,
etcetera.”
“I do think 2015 is the year we’re going to
start seeing significant movement to
virtualisation, significant acceptance of the
cloud for certain services, and you’ll see
Smart Home services proliferate.”
“If people are nervous about personal data
security in the cloud, that’s especially
important to us. If we need a secure platform
for content, it’s really our obligation to look
down stream at what protections we need to
add for your network, your devices, your data
and this will be more and more relevant as
we move to the Internet of Things.”
“It’s about
flexibility and
speed of
innovation”
All about the cloud
“It is taking the whole end-to-end process
into the cloud and virtualising it because it
gives us so many benefits. If you think of a
traditional headed it will have racks and
stacks devoted to receiving, encoding,
insertion, etc. Now imagine racks which are
just processing where all these tasks are
sharing the
same
processing and
storage – this
might be your
private cloud or
a shared cloud
– and all you now have to worry about is
orchestration, and by that I mean use a nice
User Interface to decide to use this amount of
processing for some multiplexing, or this
amount for encoding and when you want to
make changes, like adding or subtracting
whole services, it’s just a matter of
orchestrating accordingly. So, what used to be
a very fixed process of actually re-wiring is
totally flexible.”
“So with V2P you’re going to see our
direction of travel; this is the way your data
plane is going, that your CDNs are going, that
your encoding platforms are going. You are
going to see ong