Aspera Orchestrator provides an open development framework for designing and integrating highly predictable and efficient file processing and automation pipelines in support of global content delivery. Open solutions designed using Aspera Orchestrator enable customers to manage files across workflows, internally within the organization, and across locations. Moreover, established business processes and IT investments can be utilized, building on what your company already knows and owns.

Through open, partner-integrated service-oriented architectures (SOA), the supply chain connecting global suppliers to consumers, through media companies, can be fully optimized and transformed through automation. Aspera provides a cohesive location-independent architecture to optimize and integrate three key segments of the content delivery pipeline: receiving, processing, and distribution.

Predictability can be achieved throughout all aspects of the pipeline, remote contribution, internal processing, and distribution. Movement of files across internal workflows can be partially or fully automated. Lead times and costs associated with delivering content to downstream partners can be vastly reduced, getting your digital products to media consumers faster.
 

Aspera Orchestrator allows customers to build on and extend IT investments, automate file processing (where appropriate), and reduce costs associated with sending, receiving, processing, and distributing content. In turn, this reduces lead times and operations costs across all aspects of the delivery pipeline.

Through integration with open standards such as web services, customers create highly utilized service-oriented architectures (SOA) to simplify managing content delivery-related workflows. 

Capabilities include:

• Simplifying online contribution and ingest globally

• Automating manual processes

• Adapting and extending functionality non-disruptively

• Fluidly scaling content pipeline resources—for performance

• Integrating and building on open standards

• Building on what your company owns and knows

• Establishing service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Across all segments of the pipeline—contribution, processing, and distribution—predictability can be achieved to ensure timely delivery of content under fixed schedules. Irrespective of location, suppliers and distributers can predict precisely how long it will take to send, process, and receive files. Aspera’s location-independent transport—Aspera fasp™—provides complete predictability of file movement over distance. Aspera Orchestrator provides predictability through consistency of configuration, automation, and deep visibility into file processing workflows—to ensure assets can be rapidly and fluidly processed, tracked, and reported on.  Combined, Aspera’s pipeline platform provides comprehensive predictability for longhaul data movement and processing in support of content delivery.

Moreover, Aspera-integrated solutions provide high availability options for business critical workflows to ensure continuous non-disruptive operation in support of high-volume file processing workflows—where many files of varying size and type are processed concurrently or in sequence.

Commercial software from Aspera and partners can be configured and extended to provide highly available service-oriented architectures using established business process and IT infrastructure. Deployed file-based workflows and policies provide the groundwork for identifying targeted business processes, composition areas, and transforming manual processes to automated services, where appropriate. Industry-standards have matured. deployed on one platform can integrate with those running on another—through web services (SOAP, REST, XML), open APIs, SSH, and any number of commodity wire protocols (FTP, HTTP, SMB2, NFS, SCP) and application-specific APIs and management tools. Applications for integration include but are not limited to FTP, antivirus, encoding, quality control, transcoding, watermarking, and DAM/MAM automation. 

An open platform architecture should provide extensibility, composition, and optionally integrate client and server components available through industry-standards. Aspera fasp™ transport provides breakthrough advantages in speed, efficiency and bandwidth protocol over legacy transfer protocols. The automation tools provided by Aspera also allow for identifying and ingesting content uploaded with any transfer mechanism, allowing companies to build on what they own and to fully automate files ingested by FTP and other means into the same targeted processes as part of its content delivery initiatives for contribution, processing, or distribution. 

Aspera Orchestrator includes an interactive designer for easy authoring of complex workflow sequences, a browser interface for monitoring active workflows, and a library of plug-ins for leading transcoding, quality control, virus scanning, ad insertion, and digital fingerprinting solutions. Current customer deployments are utilizing Aspera’s third-party plugins developed for Interra Systems Baton, Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager, BigBand Networks, Telestream, antivirus solutions from Symantec and McAfee, and others. 

Sample capabilities of Aspera Orchestrator include:

•       Intuitive graphical workflow designer

•       Real-time monitoring of active processes

•       Complete integration within the Aspera file transfer environment

•       Reports are collected and managed centrally using Aspera Console

•       Includes comprehensive library of built-in steps and plug-ins for third-party processes

•       Highly scalable in support of the most complex and demanding file-based workflows

•       Open architecture for full customization.


Use Cases and Applications

A range of use cases and applications are support—from basic automation and forward to supporting advanced, complex workflows. For media companies, these include but are not limited to:

Secure contribution and antivirus scanning—from basic to advanced:   In scenarios where end-to-end security between suppliers and receivers is required, Aspera solutions provide comprehensive security, including integration with industry-leading antivirus vendors and enterprise storage vendors. Security should be provided end-to-end and top-to-bottom. This includes secure user and endpoint authentication, authorization, encryption (at rest and in-flight), integration with antivirus and other security technologies (such as directory services or identity management) deployed by an organization. Federal standards for encryption (AES-128) and FIPS-140 compliance should be met.

Aspera offers a range of contribution and workflow automation capabilities, to provide both simplified out-of-the-box configuration where needed—and deeper integration with complex workflows.

High-volume internal processing and transformation: For many larger companies or high-volume workflows processing large volumes of data, processing resources must scale fluidly and remain continuously available during periods of extreme processing—both internal and externally. For some companies, the volume of content ingested, scanned, and transformed is both extraordinary and growing. One Aspera customer receives and processes over 600 videos an hour, in support of 6000 file processing steps. The total workload amounts to over 500 million files processed each week.

Collaboration: Customers often need a system for person-to-person and dropbox-style collaboration, where an email including a URL link can be sent from one person to another, or to a group. This dropbox can be used for both receiving and distributing content. For example, an editor may need to send a director a clip for review. Aspera faspex™ Server and Cargo enable customers to package the files, rapidly upload them to a web site, and send a link to the reviewer. The reviewer can be setup to automatically pull the files using Aspera Cargo, or download the files using the Aspera Connect client.  

Ultra High Speed Ingest:  For scenarios where high-performance is required, Aspera has integrated its contribution and ingest platforms with leading storage partners to obtain linear storage performance scalability across metropolitan and longhaul networks, over any distance, with speeds of 10Gbps and beyond. For companies involved in production, content delivery networks (CDNs), and high-speed B2B scenarios, these solutions can complement or replace established ingest systems such as FTP.

Over the years, Aspera has established strategic partners with storage vendors to enable highly scalable storage-to-storage performance using any network—from 1Gpbs to 10Gpbs—and providing customers with a way to scale transfer speeds to support rapid contribution, processing, and distribution.
 

Licensing and Deployment

Aspera Orchestrator can be deployed and licensed through Aspera Professional Services. Aspera’s world-class consulting organization will work closely with your team to plan, deploy, train, and adapt workflow automation solutions to meet your company’s specific needs. For more information, please email Aspera sales at sales@asperasoft.com and put Aspera Orchestrator in the subject line.