With a simple web user interface and no client software to install, users interactively initiate content transfers using the IP-based Signiant Acceleration Protocol to maximize network efficiency. Users can exchange content with other users, systems and applications regardless of the location and size of digital assets. Collaboration is fast, reliable and secure.

Applications

• Collaborative Creation and Design: Dailies, Editing, Review and Approval, Software/Product Development

• Content Distribution: Digital Syndication, International, Publishing, Product Launch, e-commerce

• Content Aggregation: Remote Playout, Portals, IPTV, VOD, Data Collection

• Cloud: Resource and Application Consolidation, Active Archive

Standard Features

• Accelerated Transport: Signiant Acceleration Protocol (SAP) enables the fast, reliable and secure movement of files over the WAN.

• Centralized Network Management: Complete control over your entire network from a single view – all processes and transfers are controlled, monitored, tracked and reported.

• Content Process Automation: Automation Engine automates business processes, integrating with current products and systems to scale your business while keeping cost under control.

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Media Mover is a standard software module that provides accelerated file movement based on some standard templates:

• Media Dropbox transfers data between a single source location and one or many destination locations. It monitors the specified location at a user-determined interval and sends any changes detected in the source location to the specified destination locations.

• Media Aggregator retrieves files from multiple agents to a single target agent.

• Media Distributor allows you to schedule a simple push distribution in which files are transferred from one source agent to one or more target agents.

Manager Peering enables Managers to view and control Media Agents and Jobs on other Managers – allowing Signiant powered content networks to share content. Connecting Managers and Media Agents is established by exchanging certificates. Once the Agents certificates are imported into a foreign manager, simultaneous Agent and Job control from more than one manager is enabled.

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1. Workflow Designer creates or modifies a job template by laying out job template components in a sequence and mapping inputs to outputs.
2. The job templates is saved in the job template library database.
3. A job is created from a job template by: a) an operator supplying job parameters and a schedule, through the administrative interface or b) an external trigger. External triggers include media exchange package submissions and third party applications calling Signiant’s job scheduling APIs.
4. Scheduler monitors system for jobs to run and tells the Supervisor to run a job using a specific job template and job parameters.
5. Supervisor requests and receives the job template from the job template library database and merges this with the job parameters.
6. Supervisor passes relevant job template components and job state information to Agents for execution.
7. In the case of a file transfer components, the supervisor contacts the controlling agent who in turn connects with one or more slave agents to perform the data transfer.
8. Agents report the execution status of each component back to the manager.

Automation Engine is a module to enables the creation of flexible workflow templates that automate the processing of content in numerous ways. For instance, a template may be as simple as moving a file from one Media Agent to another, but other packages may need to be processed differently, such as transcoding and a watermarking before publishing. A workflow designer models manual tasks and business logic in the Automation Engine using components and then publishes the templates to the library. Jobs are scheduled using the templates.

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Signiant’s Resource Management is a new software module available for V9.0 software and is targeted at organizations requiring sophisticated control of file-based assets, network bandwidth and server resources. Enabling the Resource Management module on the Signiant Manager allows administrators to queue the delivery of assets between sites (e.g. New York to London, Los Angeles to Tokyo, etc.) based on business needs and changing content delivery windows. If business priorities change, the queue can be adjusted by moving more critical jobs to the top while other jobs subjected to less stringent timelines are moved lower in the queue. Additionally, Resource Management can be used to control bandwidth usage to a specific location or server to ensure systems or networks are not overloaded. Resource Management can be controlled by a single Signiant Manager in an enterprise or amongst multiple managers operating in B2B environments.

Many businesses have the need to integrate interactive transfers with automation. Signiant’s Media Gateway is an application that is installed on the Manager that allows the interconnection of person-to-person (Media Exchange) and system-to-system (Agents) to be accomplished without professional services or custom scripts. You can connect personal file transfers with automated systems in order to: organize your content for storage and browsing; bundle your content into packages for delivery; and automate your content for delivery to end users of processes. The diagram below is one example.

Signiant offers a High availability (HA) option for Linux Managers which provides protection against a Manager failure at a given site by providing redundancy (e.g. clustering) at that site. The HA option is based on a Red Hat cluster and is architected for absolute minimal downtime during a failover of a Signiant Manager. The failover is automatic. Expected downtime during HA recovery is on the order of seconds to minutes.

Signiant offers Disaster Recovery for Managers via a “warm” standby model whereby the standby machine assumes the role of the active upon failure. Typically the warm standby is in a different location than the active system. In a warm standby environment, a backup job will run to move data from the active location to the warm location based on the frequency set up by the system administrator. Details on Warm Standby and High Availability are available in Signiant’s Best Practices recommendations for Business Continuity.

• Manager performs all administration, control and reporting of all system activity as well as orchestrating the execution of jobs (e.g. files move, notification). Users interact with the Manager through a Web-based administration for configuring the system, setting up jobs and automated tasks, managing current system activity and reporting system activity. HA Manager Cluster (Linux Only) – a second manager may be installed on a Linux cluster to provide high availability.

• Transfer Agents are installed on remote computers and are responsible for the execution of jobs including filemovement, interfacing with third party products and notifications. File movements typically happen from Media Agent to Media Agent. Agents can be deployed as single node or load balanced cluster.

• Media Exchange is a java-based web application for end users accelerating the exchange of content, publishcontent to groups or interactively start workflows.

• Relay Agents for firewall transversal and isolation of content from external network. Content is not stored on Relay Agents – only used to route packages through firewall.

 
Best Practices Deployment Configuration

For System Requirements, please visit:
http://www.signiant.com/Products/System_Requirements/