By Keith Bendy
Business Development Manager, NetQoS

It’s hard to miss the “human network” theme in virtually all of Cisco’s recent commercials. They are clearly advocating a lot of converged network capabilities – voice, video, and other interpersonal communication or information methods.

It makes sense – video and voice are bandwidth heavy applications, and it’s a logical growth area for Cisco if they can provide more information about video and voice traffic. The challenge, however, is that despite all the video products they’ve brought into the market, (from Telepresence to the acquisition of Flip), there aren’t a lot of robust capabilities built into the products in order to troubleshoot performance.

Medianet is one of the largest initiative in Cisco’s history, and it’s focused on bringing those exact troubleshooting capabilities to the market. The objective is to integrate media traffic reporting into Cisco products and IOS, and get the ability to really understand what performance is for video and voice traffic. And in addition to troubleshooting, even having the ability to have the infrastructure react to changes in performance (i.e., “Autoprovisioning”) is really what the overall goal is for MediaNet.

MediaNet is just starting up, but Cisco is addressing a need that is very real, so I anticipate that its adoption will be high. Cisco may be ahead of the demand curve, but the need is pretty well established.

At a very high level, what's important to MediaNet customers is the ability to understand what performance looks like, find out where the issues are, and then drill in to get the information required to get the issue on the path to resolution. And so, when Cisco wanted to demonstrate the MediaNet capabilities at Cisco Live, they used NetQoS Performance Center because they have a lot of experience working with NetQoS (on products like WAAS, ACE and NAM) and it can take advantage of capabilities that exist today (like NBAR, IPSLA, and Netflow)

With Netflow, the NetQoS Performance Center is able to show how much video is on the network, and use TOS values to determine how the traffic is tagged. We can also see what the end-point IP addresses are. But NBAR provides deeper recognition of the protocols than what Netflow will typically give you. NBAR reports on specific tags for various traffic - instead of saying "This particular TOS queue is all my video traffic, and I don't know what kind of video it is," the NBAR identifiers would say: "This is telepresence traffic, this is security camera traffic, this is WebEx traffic, this is a video-capable phone” - and tag all of it appropriately.

Below is a video, from Cisco’s YouTube page, where Aamer Akhter, Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco, demos the Cisco Medianet 1.0 network.