AMSTERDAM—Rohde & Schwarz will introduce a new compact 2U version of its R&S SpycerNode media storage system at the 2019 IBC Show. The company said the small capacity system represents Rohde’s “competitively priced entry point” into a storage market that increasingly embraces High Power Computing based on high speed Ethernet connectivity rather than Fibre Channel. Rohde & Schwarz said it will also introduce several new JBOD capacity extension units, which provide affordable storage capacity expansion for their other SpycerNode models.

The company will also launch R&S SpycerPAM, a production asset management system, which allows workgroup editing and seamless integration of various editing and mastering platforms including Adobe Premier, Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro.

The company used the announcement to tout its support for Ethernet connectivity to eventually replace Fibre Channel, a 25-year old technology that is seeing only modest growth.

“The Fibre Channel standard was completed in 1994 and it has served the media industry well, but in essence there are only around nine manufacturers developing Fibre Channel technology,” said Oliver Gappa, sales director of broadcast and media for Europe for Rohde. “Compare this to high-speed Ethernet, where there are over 500 companies, such as Juniper, Arista and Cisco introducing new products every year and the future is clear.

“Today, if you look at Fibre Channel relative to high-speed Ethernet, there is no comparison,” Gappa continued. “The future is Ethernet and yet some media storage manufacturers continue to promote Fibre Channel, which presents real risks for their customers.“

Gappa‘s remarks are backed up by industry data. On the one hand, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) reports that the Fibre Channel market saw a return to modest growth in 2018. In comparison, the Open DeviceNet Vendor Association (ODVA) reports strong growth in Ethernet switch connectivity. In 2018, port shipments for 100Gb Ethernet switches rose 154.6% year over year to 3.5 million, while 25Gb ports saw even higher growth rates with port shipments up 251.0% to 2.6 million and 40Gb port shipments rose too, growing 12.6% year over year to 1.3 million.

Rohde & Schwarz will be in Stand 7.B21 at the 2019 IBC Show at the RAI Amsterdam, Sept. 13-17.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—When our world was a little younger and a lot more innocent, a broadcast operation had little to worry about in terms of security. Perhaps the only safeguard was a hired guard brought in during evening hours to ensure only personnel and expected guests came and went (and no equipment walked out).

That was then; this is now.

Thanks to our highly connected world, it now takes a lot more than a Pinkerton guard to protect broadcast operations. This has given rise to a whole new enterprise—cybersecurity, a term that surfaces almost daily, along with reports of email hackings, data breaches, credit card skimmers—even electronic intrusion at the Pentagon.

RISK TOLERANCE

With almost every piece of gear having an Ethernet port, one might think broadcasters would be especially vigilant. However, this is not always the case.

“Some broadcasters are; some aren’t,” says Kelly Williams, senior director of engineering and technology policy for NAB. “Human behavior is still an issue,” noting that this boils down to risk tolerance—just how serious the threat is perceived to be by businesses and individuals running them.”

While networks and larger station groups have implemented “special ops” groups for safeguarding technical infrastructures, cybersecurity for others is merely installation of antivirus software and implementation of “off-the-shelf” firewalls.

“The banking business has been all over this for a long time and the government has also been very concerned about cybersecurity,” said Williams. “However, some companies haven’t given it much thought at all,” adding that the problem is greater now than ever.

“We’re much more reliant on products that are essentially computer-based,” he continued. “Encoders, playout servers—these are really just computers running Linux or Windows, with software that makes them do what they need to do. Also, the control for devices now is all IP, with access to machines often through a web-based GUI, as not all have keyboards and monitors. Control is via an IP network. Your broadcast plant is really an IP network and is susceptible to ‘shenanigans’ on someone’s part, be it an employee, an outsider, or even a nation state. Operations are much more vulnerable to some sort of a cyber mishap than a few years ago,”

(As an example. Williams related an incident in which France’s Canal Plus was electronically hijacked, with programming on its 11 channels ceasing and normal content on its website replaced by messages presumably supporting the Islamic State. The cyberattack was so devastating it took hours to restart even basic operations, and weeks passed before everything was fully normalized. The attack cost the broadcaster nearly $11 million, not including lost advertising revenue.)

A LONG WAY SINCE ‘CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT’

Wayne Pecena, director of engineering at KAMU public radio and television, and the Texas A&M University System’s wide area data and distance learning network, and a frequent lecturer on cybersecurity at broadcast engineering conferences, echoed Williams’s remarks.

“Cybersecurity in any organization often takes less priority because it is not the core business,” he said. “It is certainly not the core business of a broadcast entity.”

And he agreed that the threat is worse than ever, recalling that two 1980s “hacking” incidents (the “Captain Midnight” and “Max Headroom” transmission disruptions) required specialized hardware (a satellite uplink and microwave transmitter). It’s much different now.

“Today, havoc can be implemented with a notebook computer from a Starbucks,” Pecena said/

So, is there anything broadcasters can do, other than bringing in specialized cybersecurity companies?

“It’s all about ‘cyber hygiene,’” said Williams, explaining that much of this is just common sense.

He suggests immediately changing any manufacturer-supplied passwords when installing new equipment, and implementing policies forbidding such things as connection of employee devices to station networks, as something as innocent as the insertion of a “foreign” thumbdrive into a computer USB port can place malware on a network.

“You need to make the entire staff aware of cybersecurity,” he said.

Williams added another very important (but often overlooked) “cyber hygiene” practice to the list.

“When an employee leaves, immediately kill off all of their passwords,” noting that neglecting this places a station’s infrastructure at high risk, especially in the case of terminated staffers.

He added that firewall implementation is not something that can be done once and forgotten about.

Pecena added his own suggestions for safeguarding broadcast infrastructures, which include:

· Use a “best practice” approach to network architecture design.

· Segment the network into functional domains—keep broadcast content and control networks separate.

· Allow access on a “need-to-access” basis.

· Use a proxy device to transfer external files with enterprise grade antivirus.

“A firewall takes regular care and feeding to be an effective cybersecurity measure,” Pecena said. “‘Care’ [in analyzing] the log files to see what is being filtered [denied or permitted] and ‘feeding’ to maintain security signature updates.”

Whether it’s a major television network or LPTV, all broadcast operations are vulnerable to cyberattacks. It behooves players to learn as much about cybersecurity as possible and to practice it on a daily basis.

Gary Arlen is president of Arlen Communications LLC, a research and consulting firm. He can be reached atinfo@arlencommunications.com.

Need to Know More?
Do you have a burning question about cybersecurity? Or maybe there's a particular topic you'd like to see us tackle in future installments of Need to Know. Email us at needtoknow@futurenet.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

To learn more about cybersecurity's influence on other technology channels, check out these articles from Future sister titles:

· Cybersecurity and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]

· Cybersecurity and AV [AV Network]

· Cybersecurity and Pro Audio [Pro Sound Network]

· Cybersecurity and Radio [Radio World]

· Cybersecurity and TV [Multichannel News]

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y.—MultiDyne has announced a pair of new optional features for its HD-3500 series mutli-rate serial digital video fiber-optic transceivers. The new Gigabit Ethernet and Sync features help convert and distribute the signals used to remotely control PTZ cameras from a distance and to accurately synchronize multiple cameras during live productions.

HD-3500

With the Gigabit Ethernet option users can control pan tilt and zoom cameras for up to two miles over a single-mode fiber-optic cable. It also aids streaming video applications and the fast transport of signals over a local area network.

The Sync feature is designed for genlocking multiple cameras and having them work in synchronization. When used with analog video, Sync can also be used for Teleprompter.

MultiDyne develops signal conversion and fiber-optic-based transport systems for the broadcast industry.

The future for video, IP and storage have at least one common foundation amongst them: Ethernet networking. Recent changes and future roadmaps for networking and storage systems are, without a doubt, about to alter the architectures of data-and-media storage as well as video transport in short order. We’ll look at some of these changes, both historically and in future tense, to provide some vision for what you should prepare for.

In the start-up days of Ethernet—around the early to mid-1980s—the strategy of “if you build it, they will come” propelled Ethernet’s development from a data-rate (ie., speed) perspective. In those days, if the storage community needed faster Ethernet, it was usually ready and waiting.

The novelty of PC computing extended to those who could afford the various components of the PC, including storage, network interfaces and memory. Storage networking was in its infancy and used only by those who needed shared data on a broader scale vs. in a PC workstationonly environment.

The cost to update or modify the infrastructure to support Ethernet was still relatively expensive; thus, major changes to networks were often delayed and were based upon the need and economics associated with those modifications.

The increases in speed for storage media weren’t occurring particularly fast either. Until the early 2000s, the significant changes in spinning media yielded only modest overall throughput improvements: faster and more reliable mechanics, rotational speed increases and reductions in latency. The big differences came in raw storage capacities, which increased many-fold from the early uses of rotating magnetic media. Ethernet, except for network transport, had little impact on storage systems as a whole.

Then, circa 2010, Flash memory as cache emerged to further improve the overall spinning-disk storage equation. As previous TV Technology articles have demonstrated, Flash dramatically improves storage system IOPS. And it doesn’t take a lot of Flash to make a significant difference in overall storage system improvements. Studies have shown that by adding as little Flash as 1 percent of the total storage capacity, in a tiered form, can yield increases in IOPS of 25 percent or more. Furthermore, as 3D NAND (Flash) was incorporated into SSDs, the cost/benefit ratio skyrocketed in many dimensions.

Fig. 1: Common Ethernet speed rates (link speeds) show current, in development and future standards with their dates of implementation. In the past, networking generally stayed ahead of other supporting system technologies, including storage. As storage systems have evolved, networking may now actually be lagging behind the storage (SSD) performance side, despite the fact more than a billion ports of Ethernet have shipped to enterprise, residential, data centers and industrial users.

Enterprise class SSDs, available today, can do sequential reads at around 2.8 GBps (22.4 Gbps). Essentially, this is faster than what a 10 GbE adaptor can support by a two times factor. It’s not difficult to see that in short order even 10 GbE network infrastructures will lag in performance to the level that storage throughput and/or system processing on network attached storage could be seriously affected; especially given the fact that 1 GbE has only recently peaked in terms of the total number of port shipments actually sold through this year.

As for 10 GbE, it is becoming cheaper and far more prevalent than it was two to three years ago. We’ve had 100 GbE since 2010, yet the 100 GbE growth rate remains much lower than 10 GbE is today. That said, 10 GbE is expected to reach saturation (peak port shipments) somewhere around 2018. By that time even faster mid-speeds (e.g., 25 GbE and 40 GbE) are expected to become common, and probably necessary for video systems where the transport shifts from SDI-for-video to IP-for-video (Fig. 1).

This gives rise to some serious considerations into how video and broadcast facilities will need to plan, network infrastructure wise, for the inevitable paradigm shift to IP.

NOT JUST FASTER
Putting the future for IP video aside, “Big Data” storage and the networking of that data is still predicted to increase by 50 percent a year. Once we seriously begin to pump video over IP, that number is surely to expand and possibly be incalculable by the 2017–2018 timeframe. Therefore, the perspective on network speed won’t be “how fast is your network,” but instead may be “how much more networking will you need?”

Not unlike what we’re finding for higher resolution video (UHD/4K)—“more, faster and better” pixels—is the question regarding storage networking solutions now “more, faster and broader” networks? Some, such as the Ethernet Alliance, believe that is the case and are in turn making a much stronger argument for addressing network improvement development.

The firestorm that is happening depicts an Ethernet ecosystem expanding by the second. Adding fuel to that fire, discussions are underway related to new direct connect 2.5 GbE and 5 GbE interfaces for HDDs. This, in part, appears necessary in order to address huge media storage systems, such as at Facebook, where billions of pictures and videos are now being housed on Ethernet-connected storage platforms. In addition, 2.5 Gig, 2.5 GigbaseT and 5 GigbaseT will allow existing Cat5e and Cat6 outlets to support new 802.11ac WiFi technologies; revitalizing cabling infrastructures in place worldwide.

The Ethernet roadmap has objectives for 400 GbE; with 100 Gb-single lane and Terabit Ethernet (TbE) as possible future speeds further on the horizon.

The reality of these higher-speed networks won’t become clear until the industry has reached a successful implementation of the 400 GbE and 100 Gb-single lane systems. Not forgetting that the products necessary to support IP-video must also include multiterabit fabrics in order to switch the 10-to-20 Gb full bandwidth (or even lightly compressed) signals for UHD/4K and beyond.

PARITY ACHIEVED
Some say that parity in SSDs and HDDs will be achieved somewhere in 2016; meaning the cost and capacities of the devices will be essentially equal. This will certainly change the landscape of storage systems forever going forward. As for networking, including Ethernet, this won’t be reaching that kind of parity for some time.

To the visionaries of tomorrow, keep these perspectives in mind as you plan your next “big” network system update; or as you consider the move towards an all-IP infrastructure.

Note: The author wishes to acknowledge appreciation to SNIA (www.snia.org) and the Ethernet Alliance (www.ethernetalliance.org) for providing background and statistics used in this article.

Karl Paulsen, CPBE, is a SMPTE Fellow and chief technology officer at Diversified Systems. Read more about this and other storage topics in his book “Moving Media Storage Technologies.” You can contact him atkpaulsen@divsystems.com.