Among the many things to consider when choosing an enterprise webcast / lecture capture system for your organization, we’re commonly posed with the same list of concerns for every project. We’ve put together a short list of discussion points relating to availability that we find useful for the initial discussions of a webcast / lecture capture system deployment project:
- High availability – do you need it?
When deploying any mission-critical application, the question of availability and fault-tolerance arises. Is some downtime is acceptable for your users, or next-to-none? Could you afford losing content in the middle of a recording? With webcasting and/or capturing events, the question of availability applies to not only the servers, but the recorders as well. - Live broadcasting – will you need it and how crucial is it?
Are live events a part of your organization’s requirements? Would live streaming fall under your mission-critical data – in other words, do you need fault-tolerant live streaming? - Do you have viewers distributed globally?
Will it be crucial to deliver live and/or on-demand content to other geographic regions across the internet, and will this require the use of a CDN to extend the performance of your servers and network? - Is your content and database safe?
Is your content going to be sitting on a SAN, or at least a clustered file server? Do you have clustered database servers? - “HOW LONG UNTIL IT’S BACK UP?”
If disaster recovery is necessary, is the recovery plan robust enough (read: FAST) to suit the criticality of this application?
This is just a quick list to get the conversation started. We hope it helps you to get the right issues exposed for discussion with your tech teams.