Skyline Communications, a global player in end-to-end multi-vendor network management, orchestration and OSS software solutions for the broadcast, satellite, cable, IPTV and mobile industry, has announce dthat CTC Media, Russia’s leading independent broadcasting company, has rolled out the DataMiner NMS/OSS platform to manage its new SMPTE 2022 media-over-IP playout facility.

The solution is built using fully redundant DataMiner nodes with no single point of failure, resulting in an uptime of 365*24*7. The DataMiner platform manages the complete virtualised playout infrastructure end to end, including video server storage, encoders, decoders, multiplexers and test signal generators. In addition to the hardware infrastructure, DataMiner also manages the playout data centre’s virtual machines, networking and the uncompressed SMPTE ST 2022-6 media-over-IP streams, including SMPTE ST 2022-7 redundancy.

“We offered CTC Media a future-proof and hence technology-agnostic and multi-vendor solution to efficiently monitor their new all-IP playout facility using a single unified user interface,” said Eldar Mamedov, Regional Account Manager at Skyline Communications. “Together with our partner DNK Corporation, one of the leading system integrators in Russia, we delivered a platform that seamlessly and fully transparently fuses CTC Media’s traditional broadcast equipment with its growing and more complex IP-based infrastructure. Such an all-IP deployment is not static, as it is expected to constantly evolve and change to new workflows. DataMiner is the perfect platform to adapt to those dynamic workflows, now and at any time in the future. DataMiner guarantees interoperation with any device, any microservice, any vendor and any protocol.”

DataMiner constantly checks the complete playout chain, proactively detects issues on the main and backup part and warns operators in the event of any degradation or outages. CTC Media’s multi-channel playout software runs on virtual machines on individual blade servers. DataMiner monitors the full stack from north to south, from the microservices of the playout to the virtualisation layers and the physical deployment. Visibility on the full stack is indispensable to perform effective root cause analysis. A built-in rack view easily allows operators to identify which equipment is in alarm.

“With DataMiner as our new platform to monitor our complex virtualised IP playout installation, our operators can now effectively manage the system end to end through a single pane of glass. The landing page in DataMiner shows both the legacy and the IP equipment and with just a few clicks, an operator can instantly drill down to every device and parameter, and control any of those devices. Simplicity was one of our key requirements, and the ability to easily expand our solution in the future without affecting operations is essential for us. DataMiner adheres to a devops style of deployment and operation, as new drivers can be added at runtime, fully version-controlled, supporting canary updates and rollbacks if needed,” said Alexey Frolov, CTO at CTC Media.

“CTC Media is fully satisfied with the work of system integrator DNK Corporation and Skyline Communications, everything was done qualitatively and on time, engineers from both companies proposed and deployed the right and cost-effective solutions during the project,” concluded Frolov.

“The broadcast and media industry is going through some tremendous changes. With the current technology evolutions towards uncompressed IP streams, it has become obvious that the ability and readiness of a broadcaster to adapt to continuous change is one of the most important keys to success. A flexible, vendor- and technology-agnostic management and orchestration platform has become table stakes for anybody dedicated to success in this business,“ added Steven Soenens, VP Product Marketing at Skyline Communications. “As broadcasters take the new IP flows from their labs into real production environments, it is clear that monitoring and orchestration of all-IP systems is a much greater challenge compared to traditional SDI platforms. Technology is not fully mature on the one hand, and on the other hand operators have to adjust their workflows to the new world. The old ‘follow the green cable’ rule to find an issue simply does not apply anymore.”

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