InBroadcast - February 2022 - 30

30
www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 12 - Issue 2 | February 2022
InTech
KVM Trends in 2022
K
With John Hickey, Senior Director of R&D and KVM Systems, Black Box...
video, mouse)
VM (keyboard,
solutions played a vital role in
2021 by enabling the media and
entertainment industry to take on
significant new challenges, such
as
social
distancing and remote
access. As we move into 2022, those
challenges continue - and they're
driving further advances in adoption
of KVM technology.
Perhaps the most notable trend this
year is the industry's ongoing shift
away from proprietary protocols and
proprietary switching mechanisms
to the movement of audio, video,
and data over IP. IP is exceptionally
flexible, it is standardized (SMPTE
ST 2110) for broadcast and media,
it is supported by a broad array of
vendors, and it
tends to be more
economical. What's more, when you
invest in IP-based KVM, you have a
large pool of talent with the skills to
work with that solution.
In parallel with the continued
migration to IP is the industry's move
toward virtualization. Rather than be
limited by a connection to a single
physical machine, post facilities and
others are using KVM technology
Black Box's Emerald KVM Over IP
to connect to virtual machines -
locally or in a data center - to gain
greater flexibility
and
to realize
greater efficiency. While most media
organizations once looked to VMware
Horizon to support virtualization, an
increasing number are now adoption
solutions
that
support
traditional model with huge teams
working on site.
As
part
of the trend
operation over a WAN, broadcasters
have increasingly begun to connect
multiple geographically
distributed
PC-over-IP
Ultra and the many benefits it offers.
Remote access continues to be so
important to today's productions and
workflows, and today that means
connecting over wide area networks
(WANs). As
people discovered
through the pandemic, remote
access via KVM allows broadcasters
to send smaller teams to work
in their outside broadcast
trucks
while colleagues
back at HQ control various
systems within the mobile
unit. Because this mode of
operation offers so many
benefits - cost
savings,
better use of creative and
engineering talent, greater
flexibility - it has gone from
an emergency measure of
sorts
to a commonplace
workflow. Broadcasters
have found
that
running
production operations for live
events remotely can actually
be easier than the
physical environments. Broadcasters
with operations centers in different
cities across the country, or even
across the world, are using KVM
technology
to give teams remote
access to various servers and virtual
machines
across
their operations
and facilities. High performance is
vital to such workflows over a WAN,
especially with numerous users, so
the installed KVM solution needs to
handle packet loss adeptly and to
keep bandwidth usage low.
Five or six
years ago, the big
question was whether a KVM system
could support HD or even 4K. 4K
support has grown since then, and
in 2022 we'll see further demand
not just for 4K, but also 5K, primarily
to
support
larger
screen
sizes.
While true interest in 8K is really
just beginning, it is gaining some
traction. More cameras are available,
and
they're becoming more
affordable all the time. Nevertheless,
it will likely be 2023 or 2024 before
the industry moves into widespread
use of 8K.
John Hickey is the Senior
Director
responsible for Black Box's world-wide KVM
business. Prior to Black Box, John was the
founder and CEO of Cloudium Systems,
which developed integrated KVM and
Virtualization
technology
A newer consideration for
toward
broadcasters today is whether KVM
systems can help them to automate
their workflow and their processes,
and
this
means
software-driven
features. It means leveraging APIs
within KVM products and others
to allow different aspects of these
systems to connect and to enable
orchestration of different jobs, from
connection to a virtual machine to
setup of an entire control room at the
touch of a button.
Taken all
together, these trends
indicate that 2022 will be a year in
which KVM solutions, such as the
Black Box Emerald KVM line, enable
greater
flexibility,
whether at
desktop or across
diverse facilities
the
geographically
and
remote
productions.
The migration to IP and the
transition to software-defined
functionality
will
likewise drive
greater flexibility and greater freedom
in building efficient
workflows.
This interest in taking advantage of
non-proprietary, standards-based
KVM systems, as well as integration,
automation, and
orchestration,
promises to be a powerful trend in
2022 and beyond.
https://www.blackbox.com
before its
acquisition by Black Box in 2016.
Earlier in his career, John was VP of
Engineering & Strategy in Avocent Corporation. He
was focused on high-performance KVM and was
responsible for creation of the award-winning and
industry-leading AMX and HMX families. He was
also Director of Engineering Switching products
for 3Com leading the development of 10/100 and
Gigabit switches and routers. John is the holder of
22 US-issued patents.
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://www.blackbox.com/en-us https://www.blackbox.com/en-us https://www.blackbox.com/en-us https://www.blackbox.com/en-us https://www.blackbox.com/en-us https://www.blackbox.com https://www.blackbox.com/en-us https://www.blackbox.com/en-us
InBroadcast - February 2022

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