Benefits of Virtualization

June 25, 2017, extracts from Essential Guide, Posted by Kenetic Team, Reality of IP

Riding on the back of IT innovation allows broadcasters to benefit from virtualization. We investigate those benefits and learn how they apply to television. Especially as we learn
of the new trailblazers waiting in the wings.

Telephone network operators were suffering the same challenges found in many current day broadcast facilities. Proprietary hardware equipment was prevalent and even increasing as new technologies were developed. Space and power were at a premium and finding places to install hardware was proving more and more difficult.

Increasing energy costs, the need for more capital investment, and a skills shortage to design, install, and maintain complex hardware systems was proving unsustainable. And hardware systems quickly reach their end of life, especially when new technologies are constantly developed. This leads to very short design, install, and operate life cycles, resulting in poor return on investment for operators.

Virtualization to the Rescue 

Virtualization addresses these problems by leveraging standard topologies  found in IT systems. Building on the economies of scale gained by hardware manufacturers during their research and development cycles, broadcast service suppliers can achieve significantly reduced equipment costs and reduced power consumption. 

Before virtualization was available, IT hardware was either under or over utilized. But virtualization enables more efficient use of IT infrastructure as it allows services to be moved seamlessly between resource and balanced with more efficiency to make better use of the available hardware.

Hardware design life-cycles can last many months and even years. But the economies of scale needed to design and manufacture hardware, such as computer servers and Ethernet switchers, is no longer applicable for software-based development.
As data speeds increase, hardware manufacturers must purchase faster and faster test equipment, and continually invest in smaller skillset pools.