CUSTOMER CASE STUDY SKY ITALIA: A SOFTWARE-DEFINED ARCHITECTURE FOR THE STREAMING PLATFORM Sky Italia's Technology division adopts a new technological and architectural paradigm to intensify digital transformation and o er its customers ever better quality. The transformation began a few years ago and now continues with the transformation of the streaming platform to make new business applications more agile, CUSTOMER fl exible and scalable, with the guarantee of maximum security at SKY ITALIA the speed of the business. The technology partners selected by WEB SITE Sky Italia to embark on this journey are Intel and VMware WWW.SKY.IT embracing the VMware's Software Defi ned Data Center vision. INDUSTRY MEDIA Sky Italia is the media company part of Sky Group, Europe’s leading entertainment company which has recently become part of Comcast LOCATION NBCUniversal. Sky Group has more than 23 million customers across seven MILAN, ITALY countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK, Ireland, Spain and Switzerland. KEY CHALLENGES Established in 2003, Sky Italia operates on di erent broadcasting platforms • Provide a high level of availability with di erent business models and has a 4.82 million-subscriber base as of and reliability in streaming June 30, 2018. • Increase the time available of TV In June 2018, Sky introduced two new pay tv o ers, one DTT o er featuring 15 programs for customers channels dedicated to entertainment, TV series, fi lms and sports and the other • Reduce costs in terms of capex one also via fi ber granting access to all the Sky packs through all operators’ and opex and improve operational high-speed internet connection at home. Furthermore, thanks to the new Sky Q e ciency ecosystem – the solution that integrates all the di erent types of reception: satellite, fi ber and digital terrestrial and that allows to view 4K HDR content SOLUTION - customers can enjoy the most advanced and engaging viewing experience Sky has decided to implement the available by creating a single viewing environment among all TV sets VMware Software Defi ned Datacenter and Internet-connected devices. Through the NOW TV service, Sky o ers, stack for its new streaming platform, also in streaming, a selection of fi lm, entertainment and sport content that users with the goal of being more agile, can enjoy both through the Smart Stick, the device that transforms all TV secure and able to adapt to business sets in smart TVs, and through the main Internet-connected devices. Sky is also needs, reducing costs in terms of on the FTA DTT with three channels: TV8, Cielo, Sky TG24. The company has capex and opex. also committed to make its own contribution and serve the public interest at an international level through a responsible business strategy which implements IMPACT projects such as Sky Academy and Sky Ocean Rescue – Un Mare da Salvare. • Cost savings in terms of capex and opex Sky Italia continuously invests in technological innovation, looking for the most • Distributed and granular security advanced technology to provide the best quality and best o er to its guarantee customers. The aim is to scale at the business needs while maintaining an optimal level of security. A Software Defi ned Data Center approach is required • Use of the physical network as a to achieve fl exibility and agility, thereby reducing the costs and the time to pool of transport services, with a deliver new services. policy-based approach • Ability to migrate workloads between di erent areas Challenge Sky has always focused on the best technologies to o er its subscribers a unique viewing experience. Sky also invests constantly in innovation in Italy, SKY ITALIA | 1 SKY ITALIA: A SOFTWARE-DEFINED ARCHITECTURE FOR THE STREAMING PLATFORM "The adoption of vSAN allows identifying the most innovative technology to guarantee its customers the best us to be much more flexible quality and the best o er, modulating it according to business needs without renouncing the optimal level of safety. and to address quicker our In particular, it was necessary to increase the on-demand streaming capabilities continuously evolving business for users without compromising security. The legacy architecture, based on the needs" traditional concepts of fi rewall and storage, did not o er the necessary DAVIDE GANDINO scalability and fl exibility and therefore only partially responded to the HEAD OF STREAMING CLOUD & COMPUTING company's request, even though it presented high costs. It was necessary to SYSTEMS ENGINEERING implement a service able to overcome boundaries, where the delivery of SKY ITALIA contents could be carried out by both local and remote data centers, always in a secure environment. All this was done by protecting the internal and external Content Delivery Network (CDN) that have access to content servers (the VMWARE FOOTPRINT Origin Servers). • VMware NSX The objectives were to acquire the ability to provide a high level of availability • VMware vRealize Network Insight and reliability, increasing the time availability of TV programs for customers, (vRNI) against a reduction in operational and capital costs as well as an improvement • VMware vSAN in operational e ciency. PLATFORM Action • 8 host vSAN All-Flash cluster with To achieve fl exibility and agility, reducing costs and time to implement new Intel® Xeon® E5-2683 v4 services, Sky has taken an innovative approach. For its new streaming platform, • 2 Disk Group per host each with: Sky has decided to implement the VMware Software Defi ned Data Center • 1x 800GB Cache NVMe Intel® stack, with the goal of being more agile, secure and able to adapt to business DC-P3700 needs, reducing costs in terms of capex and opex. This platform will become the main platform for business applications, such as the interactive application • 4x 1.6TB Capacity SSD Intel® and all the others that will be introduced later. DC-S3520 • Intel Ethernet Controller X540-AT2 In addition, Sky Italia has decided to implement VMware NSX and VMware vSAN as a strategic technology for its business applications which aim to PARTNER leverage the advantages provided by technology and supporting company dynamics, aimed at reducing the costs of physical data center components, as well as increasing speed and agility to encourage greater planning, provisioning and operational e ciency. The new platform is based on Intel® SSD, Intel® Xeon® platform, VMware NSX & vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) and vSAN. NVMe and Intel SSDs with VMware vSAN are the other key element of the solution adopted by Sky Italia, which allows to perform the scale-out without any impact on the infrastructure and to signifi cantly reduce the operational and capital costs for storage. You can easily extend storage virtualization with an integrated "hyper-converged" solution that simply leverages the overall VMware environment, reducing the risk associated with digital transformation through the use of existing tools, skills and solutions. Like NSX, vSAN is also run on Intel hardware according to the "pay as you need" model, with uncompromised performance and reliability. Results and Impact In Sky's current infrastructure project, VMware NSX technology is key to ensuring the "microsegmentation" of new business applications, while increasing network and security performance, as well as agility and scalability. To e ectively implement the so-called micro-segmentation, Sky Italia used vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) to outline the profi le of application fl ows and implement the correct and necessary fi rewall rules for each individual fl ow. Once the rules for a specifi c application have been defi ned, the operational CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | 2 SKY ITALIA: A SOFTWARE-DEFINED ARCHITECTURE FOR THE STREAMING PLATFORM "Besides that, using the micro- commitment is completely automated and, above all, the rules applied to the segmentation features that application are always "clean". This approach allowed Sky Italia to optimize its operational commitment to be able to dedicate itself to more strategic activities NSX provides allows us to for the company. vRealize Network Insight also o ers a high level of visibility reduce operational overhead that is useful for capacity planning and troubleshooting. NSX software and operational effort, components (EDGE) were also used to scale high-speed throughput fl ows to public clouds as needed, eliminating the cost of expensive dedicated fi rewall which is present in legacy devices for secure interconnections and, above all, allowing to Sky Italia to and more traditional minimize the time needed to implement new streaming interconnections. The solutions. Again there is a big Sky Italia plan also includes the use of NSX and vRNI to move workloads across multiple sites and ultimately to multiple public clouds, maintaining the same benefit in terms of flexibility security and the same network attributes related to workload, automating and and time to market, those removing data center boundaries. are the 2 main reasons that Sky can today use the physical network as a pool of transport services, where facilitate this adoption" network and security attributes are tied to the workload thanks to a policy- based approach. The availability of disks with adequate I/O performance also ANGELO SCANO SENIOR RESEARCH ENGINEER supports the encoding process as well as a CDN-enabled fi rewall at all SKY ITALIA application levels. VMware technology has enabled the creation of a secure, fl exible and scalable streaming architecture for business applications. Through this solution, Sky Italia has been able to acquire and implement the di erent capabilities to support and speed up its business. In particular, the implementation of Security Rules for packets inspection on a high-throughput network enabled the elimination of bottlenecks associated with a hardware-based approach, generating signifi cant savings in terms of operational and capital costs. VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com Copyright © 2019 VMware, Inc.