The IBM CIO organization addresses the IT needs of more than 200,000 IBM employees distributed over more than 150 countries. One of the IT use cases addressed by the CIO team is global video caching and streaming to IBM employees.
Tens of thousands of IBM employees in IBM offices around the globe watch videos on-demand every day posted on the IBM intranet. These videos are intended for internal audiences only, and therefore cannot be posted on a publicly accessible video streaming platform, so the IBM CIO team uses IBM Watson Video platform to host and stream these videos.
Streaming these videos each time from their original storage location in a data center in the United States to international locations is inefficient and costly due to internet link usage costs. Therefore, the video content is cached in 40+ local IBM offices and data centers around the globe. To cache this video content, each local edge server should be provisioned with the IBM Watson Media video platform’s Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) endpoint software.
Installing ECDN software manually to edge servers is a time-consuming process. Moreover, it is difficult to monitor and manage lifecycle of the ECDN workloads after installation. There is no single pane of glass to monitor the edge workloads. Manual software upgrades through scripts are time consuming.
The IBM CIO organization has started using IBM Edge Application Manager (IEAM) software to install ECDN endpoints to the local servers around the globe. Installing ECDN software and provisioning new local servers takes much less time and manual effort when using IEAM.
Additionally, with IEAM, it is much easier to monitor the performance of ECDN software and do batch upgrades of the software.
Through using IEAM, the IBM CIO team has reduced the time spent on deploying ECDN endpoint software to local edge servers from days to hours. Moreover, the CIO team has also reduced costs by moving some of the operations in-house; previously, they worked with an external service provider to deploy endpoint software to edge servers.
IEAM is a modern edge compute management and orchestration solution that helps organizations to deploy and manage the lifecycle of their containerized edge workloads in a simple, secure and scalable way. Global video streaming is only one of the use cases that can be addressed by IEAM. IEAM addresses numerous different edge computing use cases—including retail, manufacturing, transportation, banking and more—where workloads are widely distributed on heterogenous IT environments.