There are people looking at this 10-gig at the access level. I’m going to do this high-quality video, 4K video and I’m going to have no compression here. That’s great, but now that’s taking the core switch level and bringing it to the edge. The question becomes whether you replace the core or do you start bypassing the core with your AV services? You’ve got only your distribution switches connecting in at this higher rate of capacity.
Now that starts to become the challenge because you’ve got to tier with your regular network to take advantage of authentication and other existing connectivity. This starts to make a fairly complicated options list or scenarios for the IT department.
What should come back from the integrator in the very starting point of this conversation: Every job should have a spreadsheet now that lists out every LAN port and every wireless requirement, every source and device destination that’s required, whether it’s a static or a DACP requirement. What is the payload? With how much traffic? What are the key OS requirements? What devices have to be segregated on a different VLAN?
This starts defining those VLANs because that’s going to make this whole work altogether. That defining of the VLANs should be by the design as opposed by the IT department telling them that. What has to sit behind a firewall? Then what ports have to be opened in order to make connections come back and forth between devices that are in and outside that firewall?
TL: Are there challenges related to IT departments working with an AV integrator throughout the installation/deployment stage that IT directors ought to prepare for? If so, what are they?
MP: At the design stage, the challenge is to get a full design setup that lists every device, every connector, every cable, all the labeling and the configurations that are expected to happen along with the descriptions of the behavior.
These design parameters are needed early on by the IT folks so that they can properly size the network and yet that’s part of the Catch-22 of having to figure out the design on the AV side. They need to know that all this work has been done conceptually and that AV consultants are not missing something.
Then for the integrator, the challenge is creating a staging environment that matches the network. Whenever possible, the switches that are being used, that they’re staging with, should be the same ones that they’re going to be deploying with. That should follow the company’s standard configurations. I’ve seen that not happen.
They look at streaming devices and encoders. The customer wants to be able to take content and stream it where they’re using a teaching lab so they want to be able to take content in your case. What’s the effect to the network? The AV contractors should be simulating that onto the same switches because some switches are going to perform differently than the others. They may not be the company’s standards.
In fact, it’s probably less expensive for the company to buy the hardware and give it to the AV contractor to use, but then when they do that they’ve got to strip off all of the proprietary information, like the passwords and everything else, that are in there. At least they’re going to be more likely to have some elements that are key to assessing and delivering a fully working system when it gets onto the network.
TL: What should an IT director expect an AV consultant or integrator to provide in terms of ongoing support once the devices are installed on the network?
MP: Well, from a consultant point of view, we like to get out of the one-shot model. We want to continue to monitor the integrator and provide yearly, if not quarterly, updates of performance and make recommendations to the IT director on courses of action, re-engage with the AV integrator on continued support services, the evaluation of the acceptance of the systems and then notations of change for the next round and the build.
For the integrators, as part of the requirements spelled out by us when we do our specifications, they should be following a server support model that is priced out under that original bill of contract. We should be including one to three of years of support and also price to support if they expected life for the equipment.
TL: Any other tips that you want to throw out there that I didn’t already ask about?
MP: First of all, for IT directors, follow your gut. AV and IT are the same except that AV has always had this air of magic, don’t look behind the curtain. If you feel like you’re not getting the information on the AV system, then ask for it.
There’s always going to be this challenge around compression. There are really two sides that we’re seeing take place. We’ve got companies like Crestron saying that the enterprises are not yet ready to go with huge networks and that going on to compress is not viable. They’re offering the sub-gig solutions and they’re right. At the enterprise scale it’s very expensive to do.
Meanwhile, there are smaller companies that don’t have that problem. As long as they’re local, you can get a 48-port switch from Netgear that runs about $4,000. If you go to enterprise scale, you’re talking about a CISCO switch that’s more like $16,000 and that doesn’t include the integration and the services. Then you have to add these SSD-plus ports for $500 per module. It gets very expensive when you start doing that at the larger level.
There are other companies that are betting on the uncompressed network like Aurora. That may work for smaller companies, but as soon as they start getting into it in multiple switches it starts to get pretty complicated. I think, from an IT perspective, they should be expecting these AV proprietors to be certified.
They should be expecting that anything that is brought onto the network has been vetted from a like network topology that they plan to deploy on the network itself. Then every device should already be preconfigured before it comes on the network to avoid any security issues in terms of disabling FTP, disabling standard passwords, turning off automatic updates and that sort of thing.
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