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Network Policy Impact Report >Recreational Video Traffic

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Network Policy Impact Report

Executive SummaryRecreational video traffic, both live-streaming and on-demand, is a constant and growing load on your network. Throughout the calendar year videos of natural disasters, political developments, sporting events and entertainment news – gossip, personalities, new productions TV shows or films – have a major impact on businesses worldwide. People feel compelled to find them and view them online. If a major event or the release of a new music video occurs during the workday, employees will watch live video or playbacks on workplace computers or Bring bring Your your Own own Device device (BYOD) smartphones or tablets. Each video stream can generate between 200kbps and 1.5Mbps of traffic. On-demand clips are measured in megabytes and gigabytes. This traffic can consume 30 to 90 percent of WAN or internet capacity for each branch site. This leads to lower network utilization, misallocation of budget and capacity, slow or unresponsive applications and – importantly – end-user performance complaints.

Businesses that don’t have the tools and the policy to mitigate this impact may be faced with severe disruption to their network environment.

Recreational traffic – whether it’s video from BBC.com, ESPN.com, YouTube, Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, P2P or one of thousands of sites across the globe – is a constant drain on network capacity. Blue Coat provides a complete solution to manage its impact and keep your critical applications moving.

-> Visibility: a real-time application and web content view of network traffic, to identify and measure utilization for BBC, ESPN, YouTube, Facebook, Pandora, P2P apps – millions of rich content sites, as well as hundreds of enterprise applications

-> Control: simple QoS policies that limit recreational video traffic to 10 percent or less of network capacity, enabling bursts when bandwidth isn’t needed by higher-priority business applications

-> Acceleration: caching of on-demand rich content, reducing the impact of recreational video while enabling corporate video initiatives for training and communications

-> Security: protection for enterprise users from downloading web-borne malware; branch offices safely connect directly to the internet, reducing the cost of recreational traffic by 67 percent

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Event / TrendConsumption of recreational video is growing on a worldwide basis. The internet provides instant, 24x7 access to information from thousands of websites across the planet. Whether it’s news (such as the 2011 Japan earthquakes and tsunami), sporting events (such as World Cup Soccer, the Olympics, or the NCAA basketball tournament) or entertainment (music videos, new movie releases, or TV episodes), video is the primary medium because of the richness of its content. Add to that the ease of capturing and editing video, and posting it to internet-based sharing services, and businesses are looking at their own tsunami of bandwidth-consuming traffic that can’t be turned back.

Here’s a good example of the explosion of recreational video: music videos on YouTube. Somebody That I Used to Know, by Goyte, was posted on YouTube in July 2011. In the 13 months this video has been posted, it’s been viewed over 296 million times and spawned numerous covers and parodies. The cover video of Somebody I Used to Know by the Canadian band Walk off the Earth has been viewed 131 million times and led the band to a live performance gig on the Ellen DeGeneres talk show (USA).

Another example of the power of internet-based recreational video is the BBC website. Content from the website is available in 26 languages, making www.bbc.com a go-to website for news and information in a number of countries.

Somebody that I used to know – Goyte August 7, 2012 – 295,659, 692 views

Somebody that I used to know (cover) – Walk off the Earth August 7, 2012 - 131, 571, 033 views

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Technology OverviewTwo important technical details affect the distribution of video. The first is resolution. Video from sporting events, news, or TV shows and films is usually captured in a high-definition format (1440 x 1080 resolution) targeted for HD TV or desktops and laptops. HD video is increasingly available on the internet, where it translates to a 1.544Mbps video stream. Most, if not all, broadcasters and web distribution sites make the video available in lower-quality video format (640x360), which takes around 500Kbps of bandwidth for computer users. Mobile users will get still-lower resolution video (360x240), which fits the smaller screens and consumes around 200Kbps of bandwidth.

Video Quality Level Video Size Frames Per Second

Bitrate Range (Bandwidth) Average Bitrate

High

1440 x 1080

24 / 30 1.2Mbps -> 2Mbps 1.5Mbps1280 x 720

854 x 480

Medium 640 x 360* 300Kbps – 700Kbps 500 Kbps

Low (Mobile)480 x 360 300Kbps – 500Kbps 500 Kbps

320 x 240 150Kbps – 250Kbps 200 Kbps

* Current YouTube setting.

The other factor that determines video distribution is transmission protocol. Adobe Flash (RTMP/RTMPe) is the primary delivery protocol of choice for websites; a small number use Microsoft Silverlight (RTSP). To further complicate things, many websites and broadcasters must accommodate both browser-based viewing and streaming to mobile devices – iPhone, iPads and Android-based devices – via purpose-built apps. These apps use HTML5/HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) to deliver video to iOS devices because Adobe Flash (RMTP/RTMPe) is not supported. Google Android OS does support Adobe Flash, but for simplicity’s sake websites and broadcasters use the HTTP/HTML5 protocols to deliver video to mobile devices.

The BYOD Video Streaming ChallengeOver the last 18 to 24 months network administrators have experienced the impact of video streaming to BYOD devices. A number of regional broadcasters have developed branded mobile applications for Apple iPhone and iPad, Android phones and tablets, and Windows Mobile to deliver videos to BYOD devices. As television shows and programs, and sporting events (such as Premier League soccer in the U.K., NCAA basketball in the U.S., or J. League football in Japan) become popular, users download video-viewing apps to their smartphones or tablets. While the apps tend to be small – the NBC iOS app is 13.6MB, and the Android app is 11MB – they’re continually updated, typically by image downloads. Most, if not all, TV shows and video streaming sites have their own apps. The Netflix iOS app, as an example, is 12MB; the Netflix Android app is 8.1MB. BYOD users may have up to 10 video-viewing apps on a mobile device, each with routine updates. Clearly, network administrators will see a growing impact on traffic as BYOD device users continue to download these video streaming apps.

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Network Impact on BusinessDepending on the video source – YouTube or BBC.com, let’s say – and where the request is coming from (a laptop, a desktop or a BYOD device), a live video stream can consume between 200Kbps and 1.5Mbps of WAN/internet bandwidth. A pre-recorded on-demand video can be measured in hundreds of megabytes or even in gigabytes, a massive amount of data that will transit your network, consuming 100Kbps to 1.5Mbps of bandwidth.

Enterprises that don’t have the proper tools and policies in place to control recreational content will find that recreational video traffic will consume 30 to 60 percent of the average business-hour bandwidth. High-definition video streaming of news or sporting events can push that to 90 percent for some links. Utilization spikes like this lead to slow or unresponsive applications and end-user performance complaints. The overall result is lower productivity, excess IT costs for troubleshooting and resolving performance problems, and misallocation of budget and capacity.

Even if just a few users want to view videos of sporting events or news shows during business hours, there will be a serious impact on critical applications running across the network. The tables below show what happens to bandwidth.

Impact of Video on Remote Offices with T1 (1.544Mbps) and 6Mbps Connections

# of People in Remote Office

Accessing Video

Video Size* (Average

Resolution)Bandwidth Used % of T1 Connection % of 6Mbps

Connection

1

640 x 360

500 Kbps 33% 8%

2 1000 Kbps 66% 16%

3 1500 Kbps 100% 25%

4 2000 Kbps 33%

5 2500 Kbps 41%

6 3000 Kbps 50%

7 3500 Kbps 58%

8 4000 Kbps 66%

10 4500 Kbps 75%

12 5000 Kbps 83%

15 7500 Kbps 100%

* Typical setting for YouTube for desktop and laptop PCs (Windows/Mac)

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Outside the U.S.: Impact of Video on Remote Offices with E1 (2.048Mbps) Connections

# of People in Remote Office Accessing Video

Video Size* (Average Resolution) Bandwidth Used % of E1 Connection

1

640 x 360

500 Kbps 25%

2 1000 Kbps 49%

3 1500 Kbps 75%

4 2000 Kbps 100%

5 2500 Kbps

6 3000 Kbps

7 3500 Kbps

8 4000 Kbps

10 4500 Kbps

12 5000 Kbps

15 7500 Kbps

* Typical setting for YouTube for desktop and laptop PCs (Windows/Mac)

Below is a more graphic example of the impact of on-line video on network bandwidth: a screen capture from Blue Coat PacketShaper. This real-time screen shot shows the impact of the playback of an on-demand YouTube video on a T1 connection.

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Downstream Impact of Recreational Video TrafficThus far, we’ve identified the bandwidth impact of one or several streams. Now let’s evaluate the impact this has on networks:

-> Microbursts and sustained traffic drive network utilization to 100 percent. A T-1 line can be completely consumed by three live video streams of medium quality, notwithstanding enterprise traffic generated by email, ERP, CRM, file access, storage, backup and other applications. As microbursts or sustained traffic loads drive utilization to 100 percent, routers on uncontrolled links have to drop packets. Because of the limited intelligence of these devices, drop decisions are made at the port and destination level. How do you differentiate critical cloud applications like Salesforce.com from streaming video? It’s all port 80 to a router.

-> Sensitive enterprise applications slow or stop. As packets are dropped in flows that are driving ERP, CRM, e-mail, storage, backup and DR applications, TCP (the network protocol underlying the majority of applications), drastically drops flow rates to avoid additional problems. This often results in frozen and non-responsive applications with dramatic drops in productivity.

-> Unresponsive applications frustrate users and lead to IT tickets. This often manifests itself in helpdesk calls and tickets that describe SAP isn’t working or Salesforce is slow. That is the downstream result of a network that is fully loaded, but the IT organization doesn’t know that. They now have to troubleshoot the delivery chain of SAP or Salesforce or whichever application is experiencing problems.

-> Ineffective IT reporting delays troubleshooting conclusions. The first step of the troubleshooting process is to determine which part of IT is responsible for the infrastructure that is underlying cause of the application performance issue. Network operations (NetOps) is often “first blamed” and immediately engages in troubleshooting. NetOps, however, is hampered by its toolset.

• NetFlow reporting tools can show abnormally high link utilization for sustained traffic bursts, but they can’t report at the application or content level. Data averaging also eliminates the view of short-lived spikes or microbursts that cause issues (a 30-second spike where the network was at 100 percent utilization might average down to 80 percent over a standard reporting interval of 5 minutes).

• Sniffers and traffic capture tools accumulate massive amounts of data, and can provide very detailed application information. But even if they do provide useful reports (for example, YouTube is spiking utilization to 100 percent) It can take days for analysis to produce actionable information.

-> Limited problem-solving tools delay resolution. Solving problems is difficult because traditional QoS controls, router access control lists, are not content-aware or are too complex to implement effectively. Routers are good at mapping VLANs and port numbers to classes of service in an MPLS network. But “port 80 to the internet” includes everything from SaaS and cloud applications to Netflix and YouTube.

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Business ImpactUnderstanding the technical background of the network impact of recreational traffic, including video, provides insight into the costs associated with millions of hours of (primarily on-demand) video. Again, taking the average of 500Kbps for on-demand streams, video can push consumption of capacity by recreation to 90 percent for certain size links; add that to baseline enterprise traffic, and many links will be 100 percent saturated. This can have catastrophic impacts on the business.

Business Cost Description Calculation Your Calculation

Wasted Bandwidth Costs(hard costs)

Recreational traffic represents 30-60% of WAN/internet link expenditures – a cost of $300,000 to $600,000 per year for a $1Million bandwidth budget. Because IT sizes links to accommodate peak load times during business hours, utilization consumed by recreational applications during that time relates directly to service expenditures.

Cost = % Recreational trafficx WAN/Internet service budget

You can determine how much network capacity is consumed by recreation with a PacketShaper Network Assessment. A single appliance at WAN core can measure for an entire network where most traffic flows in hub-spoke methodology

Lost Revenue(hard cost)

If mission-critical systems are down, transactions cannot be executed and customers can’t order. Some companies calculate the cost of downtime/slow time. This often includes degradation of customer service levels and loss of customers due to those issues over time.

Cost = Calculated per-minute cost of downtime x minutes of downtime/slow timex % related to network capacity issues

IT Staffing Levels(hard costs)

IT has to be staffed to process end-user complaints and investigate and resolve issues. If IT has to process 1000 trouble tickets – and 10% are related to network performance – what do those resources cost?

Cost=Cost of IT Staff related to processing performance complaints (helpdesk, network ops, application & server ops)x % of time related to problem troubleshooting and resolutionx % of problems related to network capacity issues

End-User Productivity (soft cost)

Slow applications mean that users spend 2x the time to complete a task when dependent on networked applications. What is the impact if overall productivity declines by 5% due to slow applications?

Cost = Average burdened employee costs x number of impacted employees x % reduction in productivity

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Mitigating the impact of Recreational Traffic

Visibility, Control, Optimization and SecurityFor many companies with operations scattered throughout the world, recreational traffic presents a serious challenge. When 30 to 60 percent of bandwidth and budget is spent on BBC.com, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, and related network traffic, it creates a fundamental misalignment with the business. To mitigate the impact of recreational video on business operations – without incurring the wrath of working sport, news or soap opera enthusiasts – network administrators need the following capabilities:

-> Visibility: real-time granular view into network traffic

-> Control: the ability to prioritize and segment network traffic

-> Optimization: mitigation of the impact of video traffic on the network

VisibilityTo manage application traffic on networks you must have granular views of both internal applications and web-based applications and content. The knowledge that traffic is coming via Port 80 or Port 443 doesn’t help you understand what’s impacting internal applications. Visibility must be granular enough to let you identify traffic by flow (business vs. recreational), and in real time – so you can see traffic bursts, respond quickly, and see instant results.

The trouble is that there are so many applications and websites that it becomes extremely difficult to get a useful read of traffic. That’s why Blue Coat provides real-time traffic classification of hundreds of applications and millions of websites, measuring utilization, response times and a hundred stats for each class. Our classification technology gives you the ability to classify and differentiate:

-> Hundreds of enterprise applications, including sub-classification of key applications like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle

-> Internet applications that use multiple techniques to evade detection – P2P, IM, gaming, Skype, proxy avoidance

-> Tens of millions of web sites in 84 categories

-> Complex social media sites like Facebook that require detailed sub-classification to segment and control

This granular, real-time visibility gives you a clear picture of what is happening on your network – and a path to resolution.

ControlGranular visibility of network traffic is great – but it’s only half the network management equation. To ensure that recreational traffic doesn’t impact business-critical applications, traffic has to be segmented and prioritized. The goal is to make sure that business application performance meets users’ expectations and maximizes productivity.

Control should build on visibility by enabling network administrators to partition traffic and prioritize it by business value. It should help them to restrict recreational video so it neither impacts business applications nor incurs the wrath of BYOD recreational app enthusiasts (such as vice presidents and senior directors). Here are some examples of our application-driven QoS:

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-> Partitions can limit recreational traffic to 10 or 20 percent of capacity or provide guaranteed bandwidth to critical applications.

-> Priorities can provide a simple way to allocate bandwidth, giving more important applications higher priority. They can also prioritize access to burstable partitions.

-> Dynamic sub-partitions can allocate bandwidth fairly among active users – on the whole link or within a partition. This can be beneficial for virtual desktop deployments or for allocating bandwidth for guest wireless deployments.

-> Application based MPLS tagging – allows you to set DiffServ, ToS bits and even MPLS labels at an application level, saving you from complex router ACLs.

All these policies are driven by the application-level view of traffic and are simple to implement. You can immediately contain the impact of undesirable traffic and assure bandwidth for key applications.

OptimizeTo mitigate the impact of recreational video on network traffic (and to keep users from blaming IT), two phases of optimization are needed.

The first phase involves user downloads of website-specific video-viewing apps (examples: BBC, NBC, ESPN, TV Japan, Seoul Broadcasting, Terra Networks). The impact of these mobile application downloads can be minimized by object caching on the Blue Coat ProxySG/MACH5 appliance. The ProxySG/MACH5 will cache the first download or update of the mobile application. For subsequent requests, downloads and updates will be pulled from the local appliance instead of the WAN/internet. Once the demand for the mobile application has ceased it will age out and be removed from the cache.

The second phase begins when users start viewing video using the downloaded app. Its impact on network bandwidth will shove all other applications aside. Blue Coat MACH5, which supports all popular video formats (see the list below), communicates with video-serving servers to pull down a single stream to each requesting location. It then splits the stream – in real time, if live video is requested – into many streams to serve users at the local branch. If users want to watch a video later – perhaps because of an emailed URL from a co-worker – the MACH5 will use stream-splitting to serve it from the cache.

Video protocols supported natively by MACH5 include:

-> Adobe Flash – native & encrypted (RTMP, RTMPe)

-> Microsoft Silverlight (HTTP/RTSP)

-> HTML5

-> Apple QuickTime

-> HTTP/SSL

Blue Coat Packetshaper and MACH5 gives businesses complete visibility, control and optimization of all video traffic – including business traffic – from websites throughout the world. They can minimize its impact on business operations without frustrating sports, news, or film enthusiasts.

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In ConclusionLive streaming and on-demand video has attracted viewers worldwide who watch it on enterprise laptops and desktops and on mobile devices. Uncontrolled, this traffic can consume massive amounts of bandwidth and impair or paralyze activity on business-critical applications. Blue Coat offers a complete solution that provides total granular visibility into all business and recreational network traffic, control that limits recreational traffic and protects business application performance, and acceleration through video caching and stream-splitting. It reduces the impact of video-viewing apps, contains bandwidth costs, and ensures the performance of business-critical applications.

To learn more about recreational internet-based video in your region, see Addendum A.

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Addendum A (Sampling) Live and On-Demand HD Video Availability across the WorldBelow is a matrix designed to help network administrators understand where live and on-demand recreational video can originate by region, country, and broadcaster. Most broadcasters used Adobe Flash technology to transmit video over the internet. A very small number of broadcasters use Microsoft Silverlight.

For mobile devices, there’s a mix of mobile apps (Apple iOS, Google Android, and Microsoft) and mobile-specific web URLs.

Region Country(s) Local Network Offering Video via Web Video Technology Used Mobile

Client?

North America United States NBC Flash / YouTube Yes – Apple /

Android

Canada CTV Flash Yes – Apple / Android

Latin America

BrazilBandSports

GlobosatESPN Brazil

Terra Networks

ESPN Latin America

BandSports - HTTP

Globosat – YouTube

ESPN Brazil – Flash

Terra Networks -

HTTPESPN Latin America –

Flash

BandSports – No – WebGlobosat –

Yes – Apple / Android

ESPN - Brazil & Latin

America – Yes Apple /

AndroidTelevisa –

URL

Mexico Televisa Televisa – Flash

Columbia Caracol Caracol - Flash

South America

EuropeGermany ARD / ZDF

EuroSport

ARD / ZDF - Flash

EuroSport – Flash

ARD / ZDFYes – Apple /

Android

France France Televisions

France Televisions

France TelevisionsYes – Apple

UK / Ireland / Scotland / Wales

BBC BBC – FlashBBC – Yes.

Apple/Android

Italy RAI / Sky Italia

Sky Italia - Flash

Sky Italia - Yes – Apple

Spain RTVE RTVE - FlashRTVE

Yes – Apple / Android

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Region Country(s) Local Network Offering Video via Web Video Technology Used Mobile

Client?

Asia China (+ Macau) CCTV HTTP & P2P streaming HTTP & P2P

streaming

Japan NHK NHK - Flash Yes – Apple / Android

S. Korea / N. Korea SBS Silverlight (Microsoft) No – Website

Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand

ESPN Asia ESPN Asia – Flash

ESPN Asia – Yes – AppleIOC – No - YouTube

Australia 2GB / Foxtel / Nine Network2GB - Flash

Nine Network – FlashFoxtel - Flash

Yes – Apple / Microsoft

New Zealand SkySport Flash (RTMP) Yes – Apple / Android

Middle East Turkey TRT Flash (RTMP) Yes - Apple

Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, UAE, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain

Arab States Broadcasting Union

Al Jazeera Sports

YouTube (live HTTP and on-demand HTTP)

YouTube App (URL)

Africa South Africa

SABC / SuperSport / Octagon Flash

No – Website URL: www.sabc.co.za/

mobileSub-Saharan Africa

BlueCoatSystems,Inc.•1.866.30.BCOAT•+1.408.220.2200Direct+1.408.220.2250Fax•www.bluecoat.com

Copyright © 2012 Blue Coat Systems, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced by any means nor translated to any electronic medium without the written consent of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. Information contained in this document is believed to be accurate and reliable, however, Blue Coat Systems, Inc. assumes no responsibility for its use. Blue Coat, ProxySG, PacketShaper, CacheFlow, IntelligenceCenter and BlueTouch are registered trademarks of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and worldwide. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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