Overview

In order to protect against device, link connectivity, or software failures, Zixi supports a variety of high-availability topologies by deploying redundant components. Zixi products feature failover mechanisms that utilize alternative components in the event of failure as well as redundant external encoder or decoder configurations.

Types of Redundancy

Hot Redundancy

Hot redundancy, represented in the diagrams by a solid non-dashed arrow, involves two parallel active streams. This enables seamless failover transition between the two streams. It requires two live feeds, doubling the overall bandwidth.

Warm Redundancy

Warm redundancy, represented in the diagrams  by a dashed arrow, involves an primary active stream and a secondary backup stream that is ready to become active in the event of primary failure.

Cold Redundancy

In a cold redundancy configuration, a secondary path is available in a dormant state, requiring a manual switch over to activate in the event of a primary failure

External Video Source Redundancy

Zixi can be configured to co-exist with redundant deployments of 3^rd party peripheral devices such as encoders or IRDs.

Source Encoder / Video Redundancy 

In the event of a loss of source signal, the recovery period of a Zixi Receiver or Zixi Broadcaster can stream from a secondary stream source or local file system. Typically used to stream a technical fault slate or message that the transmission will be resumed shortly. 

PUSH Transmission Retry Timing

When planning a high-availability Zixi deployment it is important to consider timing issues. The various types of redundancy configurations offer different retry timings, which are critical to calculating the overall video dropout at the target. Based on the latency settings that have been configured, Zixi Broadcaster acknowledges disconnection after a connection loss that exceeds the latency period and then retries to establish a connection.  The cause of the connection loss also determines the time it takes for Zixi Feeder to acknowledge a drop. This can take up to 25 seconds in the worst case scenario.    

Latency Considerations

Video Dropout Time = 

PULL Transmission Retry Timing

 TBD