Data Sheet
2021

IBM Enterprise ContentDelivery Network
Deliver internal video at scale

IBM® Enterprise Content Delivery Network
With IBM® Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN), you can relieve the bottlenecks associated with delivering streaming
video to single or multiple locations within your organization’s network.

How Enterprise Content Delivery Network works

WATCH

DELIVER

TRANSCODECAPTUREeCDN

MEASURE

Global CDN

ECDN servers are delivered as virtual appliances and are deployed close to the target audience, inside the corporate network. Asa result, ECDN helps reduce the number of streams that need to be downloaded over the WAN. Video streams are downloaded
once and then distributed internally on the local network.

Without IBM ECDN 2000 client use case
CORPORATE NETWORK

WAN
3.4 Gbps
Uplink: 1 Gbps

ROUTER
FIREWALL

2000 CLIENTSCONNECTIONS

Unnecessary Parallel Connections

Overloaded ISP link

Network Strain

Overloaded Firewall

2000 Streams

Mobile: 500 X 500 Kbps
Tablet: 500 X 800 Kbps
Laptop: 500 X 1.5 Mbps
Desktop: 500 X 4 Mbps

With IBM ECDN 2000 client use case
CORPORATE NETWORK

WAN
6.8 Mbps
Uplink : 1 Gbps

ROUTER
2000 CLIENTSFIREWALLIBM ECDN
CONNECTIONS

Only Necessary Connections

Stress Free ISP link
4 Streams

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No Network Strain

Stress Free Firewall

Mobile: 500 X 500 Kbps
Tablet: 500 X 800 Kbps
Laptop: 500 X 1.5 Mbps
Desktop: 500 X 4 Mbps

Features
IBM ECDN was built to support large-scale viewership of high quality streaming video within complex corporate internal network
environments.

Reduced network strain on WAN & MPLS links

Firewall support

Avoid expensive WAN and ISP link upgrades and protect
your organization from occasional bursts in traffic. Organize
ECDN servers in multi-tier hierarchical topologies to optimizedelivery over your MPLS networks.

Use ECDN in conjunction with firewalls, requiring port 80(HTTP) and port 443 (HTTPS) to be opened toward selectIBM owned destinations in the Internet. No inbound ports are
required to be open.

Support for multicast delivery

Install multiple instances

Use your multicast network, if available, to deliver live video
streams. Use your regular unicast network to deliver video
on demand (VOD) streams to all devices including mobileplatforms.

Horizontally scale ECDN servers by installing one or more
additional instances. Player will auto-balance the load among
the available ECDN instances.

Cost saving

Support viewing on desktops and mobile devices via cloudtranscoding to deliver an HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) stream.

Postpone or possibly even eliminate the need of network
capacity upgrades.

Improved video quality, no buffering issues
Don’t tolerate low quality videos or buffering. Release highquality video content with crisp image quality and fluid motion
over existing infrastructure to all locations.

Cost saving
Postpone or possibly even eliminate the need of network
capacity upgrades. Selectively enable persistent caching ofVOD content to secondary disks in ECDN servers.

Low maintenanceYour subscription includes all updates including feature
upgrades and security patches, which will be done by IBM,
allowing you to focus on your business. IBM ECDN service is
GDPR compliant and follows strict enterprise security bestpractices.

Mobile delivery

Automatic routing logic
Pull video content for each viewer from the closest node with
virtually no disruption to normal delivery over a worldwidenetwork.

Built-in administration
Manage ECDN deployment through a web-based panel that isaccessible by modern browsers, including tablets.

Use cases
CxO Town hall meetings
Training & Sales enablement
Internal meetings

Monitor performance
Web portal shows live monitoring dashboards where you cansee health check results, and number of concurrent users
connected to each ECDN server. IT administrators can see
detailed metrics like network, memory, CPU, and disk usage
too.

Historical usage reports
You can retrieve usage reports for any duration in the past twoyears.

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Cloud installation and configuration
IBM ECDN server is a virtual appliance that runs on virtualizedinfrastructure such as VMware ESXiTM, Microsoft Hyper-V® or
KVM hypervisors that support the Open Virtualization Format.
Installation of the ECDN servers takes virtually minutes and canbe deployed to existing hardware.

Deployment steps
21

3

4

5

Networkassessment andcapacity planning

Define deploymentarchitecture

Customer
ECDN accountprovisioning

Register public IPaddresses

Define locations
to IP address
mappings in portal

IBM + Customer

IBMIBMIBM

Customer

7896
Define ECDN
servers in portal

Createcorresponding
ECDN VM
instances

ECDN testing

Use ECDN inproductionCustomer

Customer

Customer

Customer

Assessment and portal
Before ECDN deployment, IBM will work with your networking
team to understand the topology of your enterprise networkand collect and document the details during a network
assessment. Data collected will include number of employees
per office locations, public egress IP addresses, available
bandwidth etc. Based on the data, a deployment proposal will
be defined identifying how many ECDN servers are needed foreach location. Your ECDN account will be provisioned alongwith logins to the web portal. IBM will register all public egress
IP addresses in your account.
The ECDN servers are managed through the web portal.
In the web portal, you will define the locations and theircorresponding egress IP addresses. Next define the ECDN
server instances in each location as identified in thedeployment proposal.
In your enterprise IT infrastructure, you will create the ECDN
VM instances for each server definition in the web portal. Once
provisioned and started, each ECDN server instance will send
their health check status to the IBM ECDN cloud platform. Thestatus along with the ECDN server configuration details can beseen in the web portal.

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System requirements
Hardware environment

Dedicated (recommended) or shared

Hypervisors

Hypervisors with OVF support:•VMware ESXi v6.5
•Microsoft Hyper-V R2 2012•KVM

ECDN server Guest OS

Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS

Hypervisor network interface

1Gbps or 10Gbps

ECDN server VM configuration

Minimum: 1 vCPU (2 vCPUs recommended), 4GB RAM, 4GB disk
You may optionally attach a secondary disk to enable persisting
the cache contents to disk

Network connectivity

In case of 1 Gbit/s NIC ~ 200 users
In case of 10 Gbit/s NIC ~ 2,000 users

Maximum viewers supported per server

It depends on host hypervisor NIC capacity, number of concurrent
streams and their resolution. Example:•One ECDN server with 1Gbps NIC streaming one 1080p (~ 3Mbps)
broadcast can support approx. 265 viewers. (1000Mbps capacity– 20% overhead = 800Mbps that can support (800 – 3) / 3 Mbps =265 viewers)•One ECDN server with 10Gbps NIC streaming one 1080p (~3Mbps) broadcast can support 2665 viewers.

SummaryUsing IBM Watson Media’s ECDN, combined with IBM Enterprise Video Streaming, organizations can create targeted video
assets for specific audiences without concerns for congesting local connections. “All hands” meetings, and other employee
communications, can be achieved and can target all employees, both local and off-premise. ECDN offers enterprises acomprehensive internal video solution that can be used to serve restricted content to employees and stakeholders helping
enterprises avoid the worry about individual setups or corporate network strain.

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Additional ECDN related information••••ECDN support site:
http://ibm.biz/ecdn-support-center
Support for delivery over multicast networks data sheet:https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/O5GAKWWR
Deploying ECDN on Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Service
Router (ISR 4000):
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/ZR80AJOD
Deploying ECDN with AT&T Flexware:
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/RQ6QNAMG© Copyright IBM Corporation 2021
IBM Watson Media
1 New Orchard RoadArmonk, NY 10504
Produced in the United States of America
May 2021
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