Director: Solid Remote Management
Once the initial setup was complete, all MGW 2000 administration was done via the web-based remote management tool, called Director. I used Director from a workstation on the LAN, though it can be accessed by almost any browser-based Web client (both Internet Explorer and Netscape). Director is a full-blown server-side application using Windows NT Embedded 4.0's Internet Information Server. The Active Server Pages provide a robust backend programming capability, though power is understandably off-limits to anyone but the Optibase engineers.
Director's browser-based front-end is uncluttered and easy to navigate. The app's main purpose is to monitor the hardware and configure the broadcast channels. (A channel is a data feed for a stream, and may be either file-based for on-demand, or live from an analog video/audio source.) The MGW 2000 can broadcast up to 16 simultaneous streams. Since the expansion slots in the hardware allow for six encoding modules, up to six of the 16 simultaneous channels can be live feeds, which would leave 10 channels for on-demand broadcast.
The Source, Stream, and Target configuration screens for each channel can be slightly daunting. If you're versed in the language of MPEG and multicasting, these configuration options may be familiar to you. Otherwise, once these are set by an expert, you'll be able to handle the rest of the Optibase administration. I configured, broke, reconfigured and restored my two channels in a number of ways without encountering any bugs or problems with the Director application.
Streaming Tests
In my tests, the MGW 2000 captured, encoded to MPEG-1, and multicast two independent 1.5Mbps streams simultaneously. After streaming successfully in several non-production tests, I gained the confidence to multicast music videos on our production LAN, during high-network-load work hours, for several days.
Occasional, tiny glitches in the video signal occurred during testing. Some were client-specific and probably caused by CPU/RAM overload, due to other apps running, and other sporadic video artifacts were seen across all systems. The problems in the former category were annoying, but always went away before long (ostensibly when system resources were freed up). The problems in the latter category, seen on all workstations playing a stream, were so rare and negligible that they were very hard to spot.
All in all, the system worked very well in testing. Our staff was impressed with the quality of the picture and the sound in MPEG-1.
Your Applications
Basic networking knowledge is virtually all you'd need to get the MGW 2000 box running on a single network segment for unicast events. In order to multicast, you should be familiar with MPEG for initial setup. If you have a more sophisticated network (most of you do), and you plan to multicast, then you'll need LAN/WAN/VPN router configuration expertise to implement Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) for multicast traffic management throughout your network. Some older routers don't support IGMP, but all new routers do. As far as administering the box, it's a non-event: Put it in a rack and plug it in.
As mentioned above, you will need Optibase's proprietary Commotion Receiver software to play MPEG-1 (even if software decoding), and Optibase's MPEG-2 hardware decoding solutions to play an MPEG-2 stream. You should factor this into your decision-making process if you already have another solution in place for client hardware MPEG-2 decoding. Also, the multicasting capability comes at a premium, so if you don't need multicast, the Optibase MGW 2000 may not be the most cost-efficient streaming server appliance choice.
So who needs it? Even the Optibase representatives are a bit unsure how to answer when asked for details on the intended customers for the MGW 2000. Corporate training and unidirectional corporate communications are pointed to as the primary applications, which seems reasonable, as many companies are successfully using multicasting with this intention. Customers such as e.Biscom are using the Optibase as a streaming media gateway to feed broadband video to their residential customers. Many other possibilities exist in many different industries, but this is such a new product that its full range of applications has yet to be discovered.
The Bottom Line
The ability to incorporate different capabilities, such as MPEG-4, through future encoding modules makes this a forward-looking technology. The six module slots and "choose your own SCSI storage" disk interface make it a scalable solution. The low setup and administration costs make it Total Cost of Ownership friendly. In a few years, such devices will be commonplace. If you need one before then, the MGW 2000 will meet your needs.
page 1 2