Oracle Corporation, the world's leading supplier of software for man-aging information, is enabling the Information Age with Oracle Media solutions. This revolu-tionary suite of software products and services provides complete end-to-end solutions for implementing, running, and managing interactive multimedia applications-from interactive television trials, to corporate training, to CD-ROM titles, and more.
Oracle Media Net, a component of the Oracle Media family of products, provides transparent and seamless integration between multimedia clients and the high-perfor-mance Oracle Media Server ™ over a wide array of transport infrastructures. Oracle Media Net's open architecture allows application designers to build an interactive television or other multimedia application once, and then deploy it without change on virtually any networking technology being used today-or tomorrow-on the Information Highway.
PORTABLE AND LIGHTWEIGHT
Oracle Media Net's true plug-and- play architecture provides transparent client/server and server/server connectivity between virtually all popular platforms, giving system architects the freedom to use a variety of system components without regard to the differences between them. Most client and server operating systems are sup-ported, including the leading PC and real-time set-top box operating systems, where Oracle Media Net's extremely compact and lightweight design requires far less memory and processing power than other approaches.
Your applications don't have to consider differences in word sizes, bit and byte orderings, native number formats, and so on, because Oracle Media Net provides automatic conversion between different data representations during transmission. In addition, no assumptions are made about specific operating system services, processes, or thread models. As systems and technologies evolve, different components can be swapped in and out without system-wide upgrades or application changes, protecting your investment and preventing "lock-in."
BARRIER-FREE OPEN NETWORKING
Oracle Media Net is completely open, allowing you to deploy applications on a wide variety of completely standard network technologies. It can work on both shared-circuit network systems on standard high-level protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP/IP, and SPX/IPX, and on bit-stream-oriented circuits such as ATM, ADSL, ISDN, T1, E3, and RS432. These tech-nologies can even be freely mixed in the same network through Oracle Media Net's highly scalable software "pumps," which provide transparent bridges between heterogeneous links. Oracle Media Net even supports split networks where "downstream" connections from the server complex to the client or set-top box use different, higher-speed links than the "upstream" connec-tion back to the server.
Oracle's commitment to open standards means that as new transport and signaling systems evolve, Oracle Media Net will allow you to migrate your applications to new tech-nology without any loss of investment. Third-party companies with devices not directly supported by Oracle can also take advantage of the Oracle Media Net porting kit and the Oracle Certification Lab.
ORACLE MEDIA NET OPEN INTERFACES
Oracle Media Net's sophisti-cated, object-oriented RPC mechanism is completely open, making it possible for clients and servers alike to transparently access any type of service, regardless of its location on the network. Combined with Oracle Media Server's open interfaces, Oracle Media Net gives both Oracle Media Objects ™ and any similar third-party or user-written multimedia authoring tool full access to the entire set of services provided. This gives system developers a wide range of choices, and allows them to easily integrate existing systems and services into new multimedia applications.
SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
Oracle Media Net lets you quickly and easily build highly scalable applications, so consumer-oriented applica-tions can readily support tens of thousands of customers simultaneously. It provides both highly efficient, connect-ionless, message-based procedure calls as well as standard stream-based transport services- even where the underlying transmission links use pro-tocols that do not support structured data flow on their own.
Application-level services can scale efficiently on multi-processor systems without complicated user program-ming, because Oracle Media Net provides transparent support for pools of servers, with automatic, dynamic server creation. It also allows all procedure calls to happen either synchronously or asynchronously, so that high-performance real-time operations are not affected by high-latency networks.
EFFICIENT NETWORK UTILIZATION
Oracle Media Net is designed from the ground-up to deal with structured information and remote procedure calls, unstructured information such as static images, and stream-oriented, time-critical data such as video and audio. It automatically handles insertion of data messages and control information inside real-time data streams, allowing both applications and time-critical video to function across the same network channel. In situations where multiple data connections need to traverse the same path, Oracle Media Net can multiplex the data to avoid unnecessary network links. And on busy networks, Oracle Media Net automatically adjusts its operation to match fluctuating network latencies, so that time-critical data flow (such as video) can take precedence over other message types- without introducing unnecessary retransmissions that can rob your network of valuable bandwidth.
RELIABILITY
When necessary, Oracle Media Net provides reliable delivery of information across potentially unreliable network links. Unlike systems that treat video and structured data the same way, Oracle Media Net distinguishes between information that must be delivered reliably, such as remote procedure calls, and data where delays of any sort cannot be tolerated, such as video. Oracle Media Net also provides guaranteed delivery and ordering of messages, procedure calls, and even byte streams when requested. These critical features allow you to build sophisticated, real-time multimedia applications without any special appli-cation programming, increasing reliability and decreasing time-to-market.
MANAGEABILITY
Oracle Media Net is designed for easy management, even when systems scale up to multiple nodes supporting thousands of concurrently connected users. Transparent name-to-address mapping by the high-level, cross-protocol Oracle Media Net Name Service allows appli-cation developers to build complete systems without any knowledge of the physical network topology, and also allows network managers to move or upgrade system components without affecting system availability. In the event of a failure, Oracle Media Net can automatically reroute requests to a function-ing server without any manual intervention.
A rich set of GUI-oriented management tools allow you to monitor and control all aspects of Oracle Media Net. In keeping with Oracle Media Net's open strategy, all services also support SNMP, which means that any existing third-party network management facility can be used to monitor system status.
KEY FEATURES
PORTABILITY
• Transparent connectivity between software sub-systems on virtually any hardware platform or operating system: Applications servers, database servers, text servers, video servers (Oracle and third-party), all popular set-top boxes
• Automatic data-type conversions Bit and byte ordering, number formats, word size
• Supports any process or thread model
LIGHTWEIGHT
• Extremely small footprint supports limited-memory set-top boxes
• Transparently bridges between any heterogeneous combination of networks with software data pumps
• Separate upstream and downstream channels support: Standard bi-directional networks Unidirectional, asymmetric bandwith links
• Network-independent addressing mechanism
• Oracle Media Net Porting Kits available for support of proprietary devices or network types
OPEN INTERFACES
• Standards-based RPC mechanism supports: Oracle Media Server's open application and multimedia stream APIs User-programmable for any third-party service
• Supports popular multi-media authoring tools: Oracle Media Objects Third-party
SCALABLE
• Supports highly scalable application and system services on multiprocessor systems: Automatic concurrent server management-dynamically allocated or pre-allocated Connectionless protocol support Automatic context management for related requests
EFFICIENT NETWORK UTILIZATION
• Multiplexes data with real-time data streams
• Multiplexes multiple connec-tions across one or more shared links transparently
• Exponential non-real-time transmission backoff auto adjusts to network congestion
• Real-time data automatically prioritized over other transmissions
RELIABILITY
• Guaranteed ordering of messages and/or streams, even on non-reliable transports
• User-selectable reliable delivery, with automatic at-most-once support for: RPCs Data messages Bit-streams
• Data is automatically retransmitted if necessary without resending video components
• Automatic re-routing of RPCs if an application server fails
MANAGEABLE
• SNMP-based monitoring of all services
• Automatic detection and cleanup of terminated connections
• Transparent name-to-address mapping allows network changes without application modifications
• Dynamic address assign-ment requires no pre-assignment or management
• Supports easy modular upgrades without system-wide changes
ORACLE MEDIA SOLUTIONS-ENABLING THE INFORMATION AGE
Oracle Media solutions provide complete, end-to-end software and services for the Information Highway, from the back-end media server software to the front-end development tools for creating interactive, multimedia applications. The Oracle Media suite of software includes Oracle Media Server, ™ Oracle Media Net, ™ and Oracle Media Objects.
