* VBrick is latest vendor to unveil bandwidth-saving technology
The explosive growth of video traffic is no longer a surprise to most WAN managers. But lest anyone forget, new studies keep emerging to remind enterprises just how fast end users’ appetites for YouTube clips and other video content will consume available bandwidth.
Last month Cisco released a study that found business IP traffic across WANs will experience 21% compound annual growth from 2006 to 2011, driven largely by video. On the consumer side, Internet video streaming and downloads will grow from 9% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2006 to 30% in 2011, Cisco says in its global IP traffic forecast.
Meanwhile, a comScore study published in July found that nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users — or about 132 million Americans — viewed online streaming video during the month of May alone. These viewers watched an average of 158 minutes of online video per user, and the average video stream duration was 2.5 minutes, comScore reports.
As video traffic eats up a growing share of bandwidth, vendors are working to build products to help enterprises manage the influx. VBrick, for instance, is introducing an appliance designed to cut down how much WAN bandwidth is required for video presentations that multiple employees need to view simultaneously.
The VBrick Reflector device saves WAN bandwidth by drawing unicast video content from a VBrick Appliance and converting it to multicast video that can reach a wider audience, reports my colleague Tim Greene. The appliance broadcasts the video to desktops within a LAN. In this way, a dozen employees in a remote office could sit at their desks and view a video presentation, but there’s only a single video stream from headquarters to the branch office, not 12 streams.
Other vendors with plans for curbing the video effect include Blue Coat Systems, which earlier this year unveiled software to link its WAN optimization gear with video produced using systems from partnering vendors such as Media Publisher and Jubilant Technologies. The plug-in lets employees publish and revoke video content without having to involve the IT staff responsible for monitoring and managing bandwidth consumption, the vendor explained.
Some vendors, including Packeteer, have tweaked their bandwidth-management appliances to recognize Flash video among general network traffic so that the appliances can limit how much bandwidth that type of traffic can consume.
How does your company manage video traffic? As always, your comments are welcome.
