S&T's TSBroadcaster Peer Groups

Peer Groups provide a way in which TSBroadcaster systems can monitor each other. If one system within a group fails, one of the other TSBroadcasters can adopt and play-out the model of the failed system.

You can use peer groups to implement n+1 redundancy if you allocate one system to be a hot swappable spare.

Under System Mgt->Peer Management you can register a TSBroadcaster as a member of a peer group. Peer groups should be accessible to each other via a network connection. Each active model being broadcast by the members of the group is incrementally exchanged amongst each member of the group. In this way each TSBroadcaster participant has an up-to-date copy of all models of group members.

In the event of a failure, the models can be allocated appropriately to the remaining operational peer group members. In most cases, this process would involve configuring the hot spare to resume the duties of the failed system.

Clearly when a failure is detected, some manual intervention is required by an operator. They will need to:

• run the failed system model on the spare system, and,
• make sure that the output of the spare system is routed to the appropriate modulator. Clearly use of GbE output can save physically swapping cables in many instances.

This change over process should take less than 5 minutes to perform and should minimise any downtime.

Image below, an extract from the TSBroadcaster 2 Peer Monitoring page.