Scalable Example Configuration for Broadcast Corporate Communications

A large mid-western manufacturing firm needed a system to broadcast corporate information to over 300 factories nationwide with an architecture that can scale up to cover all corporate communications needs worldwide, both internal and external, into the next century. They chose Scala.

Seamless Integration Satellite Network
Scala's InfoChannel IC200 Broadcast product allows seamless integration with their newest satellite infrastructure provided by Hughes Network Systems in Germantown, MD. Hughes DirecPC Enterprise Edition (code named Brighton) was being deployed for distance learning applications for the company. Scala was able to simultaneously broadcast the Newsline channel (a daily corporate information script) at the same time as the satellite was being used for video classroom work. A corporate broadcast master and corporate broadcast server (located at the company satellite uplink site) were installed in Detroit. All sites had a broadcast receiver and player, and many sites also had local masters for adding local content to the TV monitors available throughout their factories.

Uninterrupted On-Air Playback
Players were configured with single Pentium II 400MHz on an ASUS P2B-F motherboard with 128MB of SDRAM, ATI XPERT@Play98 8MB 2X AGP with composite video output, ESS 1938, one 6.4 GB EIDE Hard Drives, Intel Pro 100 NIC, 3.5" FDD, 32x CD, USRobotics Sportster V.90 56K External Modem, and a Triplite UPS. The BIOS was set to automatically power up (which prevents ATX power supplies from turning off on a reboot of the player).

The software load on the Players consists of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation with Service Pack 5 with Internet ExplorerTM 4.01SP2, Microsoft Windows NT Workstation Resource Kit (supplement 2) [note: new installs should use supplement 3, we're still testing supplement 4]; Current chipset-vendor supplied drivers for Video, Audio, Network, and UPS, and Scala IC200.

The hard disk drive was FDISK'ed with three partitions: a 1 GB NTFS Operating System and Utility partition, a 1 GB NTFS Temp & Swap file partition and an approximately 4.4 GB NTFS 'Scala' partition for IC200, Scripts, MPEG-video, Image, and Audio files. The CDROM drive was installed as a single 'Master' device on the secondary IDE interface.

The NT OS is configured with a fixed swap file on the 'Temp & Swap' partition of 512 MB -- 4x physical memory is the practical limit for effective virtual memory under Windows NT. The system "TEMP" and "TMP" environment variables were configured to point to this partition. All "Spool" and "Log" files are configured to write to this partition as well. The NT defrag service is configured to defragment files on the 'SCALA' partition every Sunday morning between 03:00 and 05:00 a.m. [this activity adversely impacts playback] The NT 'Scheduler' service is configured using the Resource Kit's 'WinAT' utility to dump the System and Application Event Logs to a specific directory every Sunday at 05:15 a.m. A system Shutdown & Reboot is scheduled as well for 05:30 Sunday morning. When possible, services and applications were configured not to display dialog boxes or alert messages but instead to place these notices in the Application or System Event Logs.