Today, the broadcast industry uses a serial digital interface (SDI) router and SDI cables to transport video and audio traffic. The SDI cables can carry only a single unidirectional signal. As a result, many cables, frequently stretched over long distances, are required, making it difficult and time-consuming to expand or change an SDI-based infrastructure.

Cisco’s IP fabric for media solution helps transition from an SDI router to an IP-based infrastructure. In an IP-based infrastructure, a single cable can carry multiple bidirectional traffic flows and can support different flow sizes without requiring changes to the physical infrastructure.

The IP fabric for media solution consists of a flexible spine and leaf architecture or a single modular switch topology. The solution uses Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches with the Cisco non-blocking multicast (NBM) algorithm (an intelligent traffic management algorithm) and with or without the Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) Media Controller. Using open APIs, the Cisco DCNM Media Controller can integrate with various broadcast controllers. The solution provides a highly reliable (zero drop multicast), highly visible, highly secure, and highly available network.

Cisco's IP fabric for media solution supports deterministic failure handling.

During a link or switch failure, the affected flows are moved to alternate links, provided sufficient bandwidth is available. With SMPTE 2022-7, redundancy is built on the endpoints, which ensures that the link or switch failure does not affect production traffic.

Cisco NX-OS Release 10.6(1)F introduces enhancements to failure handling that provide more detailed and actionable fault information. This allows administrators to effectively understand fault information displayed in the Nexus Dashboard, identify the root cause of failures, and implement appropriate remediation steps.

Cisco's IP fabric for media solution provides the following benefits:

• Replaces specialized hardware (SDI routers) with a general-purpose switching infrastructure.

• Supports various types and sizes of broadcasting equipment endpoints with port speeds up to 100 Gbps.

• Supports the latest video technologies, including 4K and 8K ultra HD.

• Scales horizontally. When you need more capacity, you can add a leaf switch to support more endpoints.

• Provides a deterministic network with zero packet loss, ultra low latency, and minimal jitter.

• Capable of synchronizing all media sources and receivers.

• Provides deterministic failure handling that sends traffic to the receiver when a link fails between a leaf and the spine.

• Supports the coexistence of live and file-based traffic flows for postproduction work.

• Offers increased network security.

• Provides a non-blocking network design to prevent the oversubscription of links.

• Requires no changes to the existing operator workflow.