Cisco's Video and Audio solution?

[vanjaburic]

Hi all,

Here is the scenario that I need your help or suggestions with.

Let’s say that one very wealthy person wants to integrate video and audio solutions in his three homes (California, New York and St. Louis). He already has high end windows media servers that will take care of video, audio, HD etc within the house itself. One house, lets say New York is the main hub site and two others will be remote clients.

My questions are: is there any Cisco device (cost is not the issue) that will allow him to share audio (mp3’s etc), video (movies, conferencing etc) streaming, HD between sites? Device will have to be secure and all data will have to be moved securely, reliably and fast between the sites. Basically, that Cisco device will control the transport of data, security, QOS. I am looking for the device that it’s geared more towards home based solution. Is there such a Cisco device on the market right now?

I though about layer three switches like 3550 or 6509 but that’s more enterprise solution. Is there something from Cisco that it’s more oriented for video and audio?

Any help and suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[travis-dennis_2]

If you already have the media servers in a central location then it would seem to me that only thinkg you need to do is create a link between the 2 other houses back to the central location. I would probably go the VPN route with some Cisco routers creating a VPN tunnel back to the cental site. I am not sure that you meant money os no cost from the point of getting the equipment or getting the links which will generate recurring costs but were I you and not having a full understanding of what is actually needed I would look at the Cisco 2800 series routers at each location along with a Cisco Catalyst 500 series switch. On the 2800 series you can add either a 4-port or 9-port Ethernet card to it. What that would allow you to do is get either 4 or 9 high-speed Internet connections through the local cable companies (throw a DSL cicruit in there for redundancy). You should e able to load share the data and get yourself somewhere between 20-30 Mbps of throughput depending on what the local cable companies have to offer.

The only issue with the cable and DSL is that there would be no QoS while the data was traversing the public Internet but I have run both voice and video over the public Internet with very good results (not perfect but good). If you have to have QoS and cost is truly no object then you could go point-to-point with an ISP or even MPLS but that is a story unto itself. Feel free to contact me off-line at tdennis@datasourcepro.com if you need to go into details and specfics

Hope this helps.

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[vanjaburic]

Travis,

Thank you for your prompt response.

i thought about similar solution that you have described, but i was thinking more about switches from Cisco that are optimized for Audio/Video Distribution over TCP/IP.

I was just wondering if there is a such a thing from Cisco. You can check this link out for similar switch: http://www.netstreams.com/ProdDesc.aspx?ID=40

Problem here is that this switch doesn't support VPN or much of the security.

Thanks in advance

[adhernan]

The infrastructure equipemnt is not what would actually be performing the media sharing. You would be tweaking the routers etc for QOS and nothing more. Where you would want to start is looking into UPNP servers which are capable of sharing digital media .. basically setup a library of videos/images/music and point your devices to this... Might wanna start looking here http://www.upnp.org/ .. http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/ .. If you are looking to connect the sites via VPN then your best option would be QOS using LLQ w/ CBWFQ to prioritize media traffic any 2800 series router can do this and supports hardware VPN encryption..

-Adam