At-A-Glance

Medianet on Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches:

An Intelligent Campus Network Optimized for Rich Media
Why Medianet?

Figure 1. Video Traffic Growth Trend

Organizations are increasingly adopting new business video and collaboration

technologies. These applications pose different demands in the network. This makes
delivery and the quality of media unpredictable and increasingly complex for network
operators and managers.

Dominant
Traffic Type
Video
Communications

Medianet is what Cisco recommends as a best-practice architecture for video and

collaboration deployments, helping address these challenges, simplifying, lowering
risks, cutting costs, and improving the quality of video and collaboration deployments.

Video
Content

P2P

What is the Value of Medianet?

By 2014 global online video traffic is estimated to grow to be six times greater than in
2009. Video is becoming an increasingly important means of business communication,
providing more personal and effective collaboration and delivering a vehicle to
encourage business innovations.
Video will not remain only on the desktop in the corporate office: the Cisco Visual
Networking Index predicts that nearly 90 percent of the worlds consumer traffic will
be some form of video by 2014 (the highest growth rate of any application category
measured within the Cisco VNI forecast at this time). The annual global IP traffic will
reach almost three-fourths of a zettabyte (equivalent to more than 180 billion DVDs).
(See Figure 1.)
Following an architectural approach to video traffic deployment with Cisco Medianet
helps organizations deal with video traffic growth challenges, by simplifying the task of
rich media traffic management and improving the effectiveness and reliability of video
and collaboration applications.

WWW
Gopher, FTP

1993-1995

1995-2000

2000-2013

2013-2025

2025+

What Are the Benefits of Medianet?

Medianet has built-in intelligence to address the unique challenges of video and rich
media by providing:
Reduced operational costs
-- Simplified installation and management of video endpoints
-- Faster troubleshooting for voice, data, and video applications

2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks.
Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

At-A-Glance

Ability to perform a predeployment assessment of the effects of video, voice, and

data in a network in order to increase the confidence of network and application
operators
Service-level agreement (SLA) assurance and performance monitoring: Provides the
ability to simulate traffic flows and gather primary metrics for performance analysis
Ability to differentiate business-critical applications, determine the importance of a
session based on its business value, and provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS)
Faster end-user adoption of rich-media applications through a simplified user
experience

Video Deployments with Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches

The predecessors of the Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches, the Cisco Catalyst
6500 Series Switches, have been used in numerous types of deployments centered
around voice and video applications: broadcast studio networks (for example, those
used in the recent Vancouver and London Olympics, which combined the use of Layer 3
multicast traffic in a redundant network design based on virtual switching system [VSS]
technology), airports (where Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS] and multicast VPN
with extranet technologies have been employed), hospitals (utilizing the VSS technology
with advanced QoS capabilities to provide real-time communication), and more.
The Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series follows in those footsteps and brings current and new
features to higher levels of performance and scalability. It provides network designers
with a wealth of tools customized to video deployments, such as:
Advanced QoS capabilities for video traffic prioritization in order to minimize traffic
loss caused by congestion (with up to eight queues, multiple traffic thresholds, up
to 256K QoS ternary content-addressable memory [TCAM] entries for extremely
granular QoS policies, and so on). Figure 2 shows a typical granular mapping
scheme of differentiated services code point (DSCP) levels to multiple queues and
thresholds. With this scheme, for example, its possible to differentiate multiple
classes of traffic such as voice over IP (VoIP), broadcast video, real-time interactive,
multimedia conferencing, streaming, network control, transactional data, best effort,
and so on. In addition, the hardware is capable of supporting dual priority queues,
with priority queue 1 having a higher priority than priority queue 2. This can be
useful when two classes of traffic are extremely latency sensitive and require strict
priority treatment, with class 1 having higher priority than class 2 (for example high
quality high definition voice and video traffic in a congested environment).

Figure 2. An Egress Queuing Example Model

Application

1P7Q4T

DSCP

Network Control

(CS7)

Internetwork Control

CS6

VoIP

EF

Broadcast Video

CS5

Multimedia Conferencing

AF4

Realtime Interactive

CS4

Multimedia Streaming

AF3

Signaling

CS3

Transactional Data

AF2

Network Management

CS2

Bulk Data

AF1

Scavenger

CS1

Best Effort

DF

EF
CS5
CS4

PQ (30%)

CS7
CS6
CS3
CS2

Q7 (10%)

AF4

Q6 (10%)

AF3

Q5 (10%)

AF2

Q4 (10%)

AF1

Q3 (4%)

DF

Q2 (25%)

CS1

Q1 (1%)

Q7T4
Q7T3
Q7T2
Q7T1

1P7Q4T (DSCP-to-Queue) Queuing Model

Autoconfiguration features such as AutoQoS, which supports template-based

global QoS configuration for easier and faster QoS deployment. These features
help to reduce time and cost involved in switch deployment, while enabling a more
effective and specific configuration of the network devices based on the needs of
the connected end devices and of the user applications.
Medianet flow metadata generation and consumption capabilities to share consistent
flow definition data across multiple network elements so as to uniquely identify
a flow and easily apply QoS policies to it. This enables the user to differentiate
business-critical applications end to end and to determine the importance of a
session based on its business value so that the network can consistently provide
service assurance and optimal user experience.
Support for high-performance multicast traffic forwarding and advance multicast
protocols (such as PIM SSM and Bidirectional PIM) to enable multicast services
when one-to-many or many-to-many communication is required.
Support for wire-rate Flexible NetFlow statistics collection in hardware to provide
deep visibility into all the traffic traversing the switch and in particular into both
unicast and multicast video flows that are forwarded by the switch. Statistics for
replicated packets of multicast video flows are also maintained thanks to egress
NetFlow collection.

2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks.
Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

At-A-Glance

Performance monitoring analytics (Cisco Performance Monitor) to identify and

troubleshoot problems associated with video flow forwarding (such as packet loss,
excessive delay, abnormal jitter, and so on). This capability enhances visibility into
the network to generate baselines, simplify planning, and accelerate troubleshooting
of video, voice, and data applications. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3. Cisco Performance Monitor: Analytics for Troubleshooting of Video Traffic

Video Traffic
Everythings OK

Jitter Affecting
TP Session

Packet Drops
Detected
MPLS
Cloud

Public IP
Network

Cisco Mediatrace capabilities to monitor the nodes along a specific video flow
path and to collect hop-by-hop statistics about that flow. This allows the network
administrator to trace the hop-by-hop handling of rich-media flows end to end
so as to assess the effects of video, voice, and data in the network and enhance
capacity planning.

Why Cisco?
Some vendors focus on the applications only, which limits their ability to use network
intelligence and react to unforeseen network degradation, whereas other vendors
focus on the network only and miss opportunities to perform advanced services
because of limited visibility into the applications.
The Cisco competitive differentiation comes from its unique ability to tightly integrate
rich-media applications and intelligent network services through advanced video
features. This integration between applications and network provides superior visibility,
dynamic troubleshooting, and the ability to protect business-critical traffic.
The highly scalable and highly flexible Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series offers users a wealth
of advanced features customized to video deployments that can greatly simplify both
the task of the network designer to plan for reach media traffic deployment and the
task of the network administrator to analyze voice, video and data traffic and resolve
issues that might arise in a production network.

For More Information

www.cisco.com/go/6800
www.cisco.com/go/medianetkb

2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks.
Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
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