IBC: SDNsquare To Introduce GRIDdiscovery

SDNsquare, a provider of SDN-based network management solutions for IP production environments, will be attending IBC 2022 (RAI, Amsterdam, Sept. 9-12) at booth 10.F40B, where it will be demonstrating the upgrades it has introduced to its core solution GRID, while also launching its new SDN-based GRIDdiscovery solution, developed to manage existing IP infrastructures.

SDNsquare’s flagship GRID offering constitutes “a highly flexible, intuitive and powerful SDN controller for greenfield sites where there is no existing IP-based infrastructure — and thus incorporates design and rollout along with ongoing operational management,” the company says.

But SDNsquare recognized that with the maturation of IP-based production, many broadcasters now maintain legacy IP systems that were implemented in the early days of IP understanding, and which could be significantly optimized through more effective network management. For this, it developed the GRIDdiscovery solution.

In this way, GRIDdiscovery focuses only on management of the operational network. Its name reflects its central role: to ‘discover’ the existing elements on the system, assign them control handles and provide an intuitive UI for their management, loaded with an extended range of wizards which automate and streamline the process, and implement best-practice management decisions upon the network automatically in order to optimize performance, in effect creating what it calls “a network engineer in a toolbox.”

Suitable for implementation upon any existing network topology, with NMOS and REST API support and active monitoring of switch and flow processes with automated rerouting, GRIDdiscovery, the company says, “constitutes a fully scalable and cost-effective way for broadcasters to leverage the maximum benefit from their IP assets, regardless of age. This allows them to benefit from lower OpEx and maintenance costs, significantly reduces risk in relation to network disruption or failure, grants a greater range of potential functionalities, and reduces overall power consumption, thus granting ecological as well as economic benefit.”

Improving yet further the stress-free, intuitive nature of GRID is also a key feature of the recent upgrades on show at IBC, SDNsquare says. “Seamless IP stream handover between different sites (across both LAN and WAN) further increases the flexible, reliable nature of the GRID setup, facilitating error and stress free deployment of and transfer between remote broadcast environments. Plug and play and auto-discovery features also ease the time and complexity associated with setups.”

New advancements to the initial GRID solution (which also apply to GRIDdiscovery) will also be demonstrated at the booth, most important of which is the addition of Cisco integration and simultaneous functioning with Arista or other switches (including Netgear, Mellanox/NVidia), all within the same GRID-managed network.

Indeed, integration with third party standards and products is one of the key areas of enhancement that SDNsquare says it will focus on at IBC. This includes an ability to handle networks utilizing  NDI, a network protocol for the bi-directional, low latency control and transport of audio, video and metadata signals.

Furthermore, collaboration with Bridge Technologies will see the integration of industry-leading monitoring and analytics metrics into the GRID management system.