Cisco to Optimize Infrastructure of NTT Plala’s Video Streaming Service, “Hikari-TV” with Cisco Nexus and ACI

Enabling Unified Management of System Monitoring and Operation with Scalability for Large Scale Services

Cisco Systems G.K. announced today that NTT Plala Inc. adopted Cisco’s SDN Solution, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI), and software management solutions for data centers, Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Dashboard Insights, to support the core system of NTT Plala’s “Hikari–TV” video streaming service which reaches 2.95 million subscribers. NTT Plala is the first service provider in Japan to implement the Nexus Dashboard Insights. The system has been launched in multiple locations since January 2022.

NTT Plala owns the media operation center and has taken advanced initiatives to unify monitoring and management of the system for large scale services. As the system continues to expand, it resulted in growing number of devices and more configurations required for each device, generating challenges to grasp the latest network status and manage configuration efficiently with limited manpower.

Products selected to solve these challenges were Cisco’s new data center solutions, Cisco ACI consisting of Cisco Nexus 9000 Series, Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), Cisco Nexus Dashboard, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights. These products were selected for its interoperability, scalability, and visualization capabilities to support large scale service infrastructures, and NTT Plala also recognized the high quality, stability, and support of Cisco Nexus data center switches that the company has been using at their data centers.

The new network introduced this time with configuration in the multi-tiered architecture using Cisco Nexus 9000 equipped with 400G Ethernet ports helps to achieve flexible designing eliminating physical restrictions, meeting the demand for high-definition videos that consume bandwidth, securing expandability, and the power saving reducing the environmental burden to contribute to solve environmental issues.

From the operation perspective, the APIC can be used to understand the entire configurations and set up all switches all at once, eliminating the need of manual configuration management and individual device setting. This enables to shorten time to service launch and reduce the operational load. In the future, by linking APIC and automation tools for higher-layer systems, the company to automate entire systems setting including networks.

In addition, Nexus Dashboard Insights now allows to continuously capture traffic flow data, AI-based analyses, and anomaly detection which could not have accomplished with conventional Syslog and periodical polling style, helping the company to improve service quality in large-scale networks and shorten the response time in the event of a failure.

Comments:
Minenobu Ohashi, Manager, Network Engineering Department, NTT Plala Inc.

” In addition to the reliability in Cisco’s products and support, Cisco’s vision toward technology innovation in the variety of fields from software and silicon helped our decision to select the solution with assurance for our large-scale system foundation for consumer services. In addition, while NTT group has taken the initiative to reduce the environmental burden across the society by utilizing ICT, Cisco embraces the same vision and action for environmental sustainability. We are pleased to have such reliable partner to share the common goal.”

Yoshiyuki Hamada, Managing Director, Service Provider Operations, Cisco

“As the virtualized networks are introduced into the critical communications infrastructures in full scale, the needs for stable operation in service providers’ data center networks have become higher. In such circumstances, we are pleased that our solution was selected for NTT Plala’s service platform system. Cisco will continue to support NTT Plala to ensure that everyone who watches Hikari-TV can enjoy even more fulfilling entertainment services at ease.”

Additional resources

・Cisco Data Center Switches

・Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)

・Cisco Nexus Dashboard