Application Performance Brief: Adobe Flash Video
Performance Summary
Reduced Adobe Flash video
bandwidth delivered via RTMP
by 65% to 95%
>
Enabled a T1 1.544 Mbps
WAN link to handle video for
100 users
>
Blue Coat Accelerates and Optimizes Adobe Flash
RTMP Video
For many, video is fast becoming the communications platform of choice. Its unique combination
of visual and auditory elements, which can be accessed from almost anywhere, using almost
any device, enables video to make connections with users like no other medium. Increasingly
businesses are relying on video to inform, educate, and inspire their employees, partners and
customers. All this video, however, can overwhelm networks, degrading the performance of not
only the video, but all the other applications your users rely on to conduct business. Blue Coat can
help; our video optimization solution can make sure your infrastructure is able to support all your
video and multimedia demands to deliver an optimal experience for every user.
Video over the WAN
If your business isn’t prepared to support and deliver video, it can overwhelm the media
servers that house and distribute the video and consume your WAN. When you think of all the
different people within a company simultaneously watching different videos (both business and
recreational), at 500k to 1.2 Mbps per video stream (and up to 4 to 7 Mbps for HD), it’s easy to
see how it can burden your servers and network. When this happens, the overall performance
of your network can be adversely affected, rendering all your video and other business-critical
applications virtually inoperable. It’s difficult to add bandwidth to keep pace with the demand of all
these multimedia applications, plus it can quickly become cost prohibitive. As a result, you need
to find a way to optimize the delivery of this content and scale your network to meet the everincreasing needs of your organization.
How Blue Coat Accelerates and Optimizes Adobe Flash videos
Test Scenario
These tests were conducted
using a 350-second video
transferred over a simulated
1.544 Mbps (T1) WAN link with
100ms latency.
Starting condition: Multiple
requests for video. Video has
not passed through the Blue
Coat appliances previously.
Blue Coat utilizes RTMP to
cache full video to remote
appliance. Once cached it is
served locally to users.
>
With Blue Coat’s WAN optimization solution, you can ensure your infrastructure is prepared to
support all your video needs, and is capable of delivering a satisfactory user experience for all the
applications and services you rely on to run your business. This is because Blue Coat’s solution
is designed to not only provide optimal delivery of video, but also files, email and other clouddelivered applications to give you a truly comprehensive solution. With Blue Coat, you can:
Scale Live Video: Blue Coat ensures your users can access all the live programming they need.
Blue Coat provides live stream splitting for Adobe RTMP. A single live stream is served from a
central media server, traverses the WAN, and is split or multiplied at the branch office to all users.
With Blue Coat, you can offload the media servers in the data center, drastically reduce the traffic
over the WAN to a single video stream, and maintain complete reports of video use.
Optimize On-Demand Video Delivery: Blue Coat enables you to cache video at the office locations
of your users, so it’s available when they need it, on-demand. After the first user receives
the video the file is cached on the local server at the branch location, allowing the video to be
accesses quickly and easily by subsequent users. Blue Coat also helps you roll out a content
distribution network (CDN), so you can pre-populate content when convenient (overnight) to
reduce peak WAN usage and proactively control content delivery.
Manage Your WAN to Protect from “Video Floods”: First, Blue Coat optimizes both internal
and external/Internet video, to reduce the burden on the WAN. Second, Blue Coat provides tools
to differentiate between content sites and categorize all your web content, so you can apply a
powerful policy to set quality-of-service (QoS) limits on the availability of WAN bandwidth for
specific sites or entire categories. As a result, you can contain recreational video and prevent
it from overwhelming or impacting other business-critical applications and protect against
video floods.
Comprehensive Video Coverage: Blue Coat offers a broad spectrum of application specific
technologies to support the dozens of different video file types you have in your environment –
such as Flash (.swf), HTML5, QuickTime (.mov), Windows Media (.mp4/.wmv) and many more.
Blue Coat’s specialized video technology can optimize all of these (HTTP/SSL, RTMP, RTSP)
application protocols and content types to provide you a complete solution for optimizing and
managing video.
Performance Results
Using a simulated 1.544 Mbps (T1) WAN link with 100ms latency, MACH5 WAN optimization
reduced RTMP-based video WAN utilization by 65 to 95%
Bandwidth reduction for 350 second Adobe Flash video transferred over WAN via RTMP
(100 users viewing video; bandwidth reduction is between 65% and 95%)
Application Performance Brief: Adobe Flash Video
Blue Coat Benefits
Scale Internally
Developed Video
RTMP protocol optimization,
object caching and byte
caching enable existing WAN
infrastructure to handle video
without impacting other
applications.
Reduce Server Utilization
Object caching and protocol
optimizations reduced the
number of videos that Adobe
Media Servers must stream,
allowing for greater scalability
and ROI.
About Blue Coat MACH5 Acceleration Technology
Blue Coat MACH5 technology is a patent-pending combination of five separate application
management and tuning technologies that provide unrivaled improvements in application
performance and bandwidth utilization. Whether at the edge of your network, or right in the heart of
it, MACH5 technology provides a powerful toolkit for meeting any application delivery challenge.
Defend Against External
Video Floods
These technologies include:
Deploy Blue Coat to intelligently
prioritize and bandwidth-shape
external video traffic to protect
essential traffic to ensure
business operations
run smoothly.
Assign priority and network resources based not only on port or device, but on users, applications
and content to more accurately reflect your corporate policies on the network. Works by itself,
or integrates with your infrastructure QoS to provide application intelligence to the packet
switching network.
Complements Current
Infrastructure
Blue Coat WAN optimization
technology integrates with
your IT infrastructure with no
changes to applications or
WAN topology.
Bandwidth Management
Protocol Optimization
Improves the performance of protocols that are inefficient over the WAN through specific
enhancements that make them more tolerant to the higher latencies typically found there. Blue Coat
has been optimizing network protocols for over a decade, and offers multiple improvements for TCP,
CIFS, HTTP, HTTPS, MAPI and most streaming video and IM protocols.
Byte Caching
Cache repetitive traffic found in the byte stream and serve it locally to reduce the amount of traffic
that actually uses the WAN at all. Works like a customized compression algorithm for your network
traffic, and leads to dramatic bandwidth savings.
Object Caching
Store files, videos and web content locally, providing LAN-like performance for WAN users, without
the overhead and risk of traditional wide area file services. For content delivery, no technology does
more to reduce latency and bandwidth to improve the end user experience.
Compression
Inline compression can reduce predictable patterns even on the first pass, making it an ideal
complement to byte caching technology.
About the Blue Coat ProxyClient
ProxyClient™ builds on Blue Coat’s secure web gateway and acceleration technologies to extend
application delivery to the desktop. Using MACH5 technology, including caching, compression and
protocol optimization, ProxyClient accelerates web and office applications for roaming and small
branch users. ProxyClient delivers LAN-like user experience and Blue Coat web filtering with a
simple and easy footprint for installation, configuration, deployment and ongoing maintenance.
Blue Coat Systems, Inc.
www.bluecoat.com
Corporate Headquarters
Sunnyvale, CA USA // +1.408.220.2200
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Hampshire, UK // +44.1252.554600
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Hong Kong // +852.3476.1000
Copyright © 2011 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. v.DS-AB-ADOBE-FLASH-VID-v1-0711