WAAS Prepositioing for RTMP FLV video content

[Serco_Nats]

Hi everyone

Is WAAS Prepositioing for RTMP FLV video content achievable ?

We are implementing a Cisco Show and Share solution and were planning on using HTTP progressive downloading from a external web server. We have a load test yesterday and ran into slow response and juddering problems even on local traffic. This could be a limitation of the Show and Share hardware so im looking at the possability of using FLV streaming to increase the concurrent user limit.

Are we able to prepositioing RTMP flash content?

Many Thanks

Adam

[pevaneyn]

Hello Daniel,

I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that WAAS does not handle preposition of content which is not CIFS.

The good news is that we have a product which can do this and much more: CDS-IS. Please see:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/video/ps7191/ps7127/product_data_sheet0900aecd806a40f3.html

Please talk to your Cisco Account Manager about your needs. I'm certain that they can help you out.

Best regards, Peter

[Serco_Nats]

Thanks for your quick reply, the document below shows that flash content can still use prepositioned to the remote site WAE and populate the DRE cache but is served from the origin server. This is sufficiant for what we need as 80% of the video file will be taken from the remote site WAE instead of traversing the WAN.

The document says this is the case for flash and HTTP content, would this be the same if we implemented a flash streaming server at the datacentre and the video was sent using the RTMP protocal?

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/contnetw/ps5680/ps6870/white_paper_C11-499858.html

[pevaneyn]

Hello Daniel,

Well as the whitepage indicates that using 'file' access, so using CIFS that then you can preposition data.

Of course WAAS will cache content requested using HTTP, but you cannot automatically preposition this data. You could of course run the video before the event, and do a 'manual' preposition of the data.

Please note that the main difference between HTTP and CIFS in this case is that the WAAS does not have knowledge of HTTP. So if two clients request the same URL the sever needs to send the data twice. WAAS will recognise that the second request is the same data and will not send it across the WAN, but the server still needs to send it.

In contrast ACNS or CDS-IS know that the same URL gives the same data, so the second client will NOT cause the server to send all data, just a 'did the data change?' request.

For CIFS WAAS does something similar and does not require the server to resend the file. But as said NOT for http.

Best regards, Peter

[Serco_Nats]

Thanks Peter

The document says - The high-bandwidth, large-file-based Windows Media video content, comprising the vast majority of the potential WAN traffic, can be fully prepositioned from the origin server and served locally from the edge Cisco WAAS WAE devices, thereby removing most of the Cisco Video Portal traffic that would otherwise traverse the network. The remaining non-file-based content, the HTTP and Adobe Flash content, should still be prepositioned to the edge using CIFS prepositioning to take advantage of prepopulation of the DRE cache for best compression when the content is actually requested, but the content is ultimately served from the origin server. Prepositioning this content allows the DRE cache to be preloaded so that any subsequent requests for this content can be re-created from the DRE cache, reducing the total access time.

So if this is the case, we can prepositioing the non-file-based content ie HTTP and Flash, this will work for HTTP progressive downloads from our SaS server. However I am looking into what WAAS can do when we use a flash streaming server, Ive read that it can use stream splitting for this, has anyone used this in a enterprise environment?

I understand ACNS or CDS-IS would be the best option when streaming video, in an ideal world I would go for that but our customer is restricted by budget and we need to use what they already have in place at this time, which is WAAS.

Many Thanks