Lawo’s Home, is a management platform for IP-based media infrastructures natively built on cloud-ready microservices architecture, enabling users to connect, manage and secure networked production set-ups. It also provides centralised access and control for all Lawo gear within a set-up.

‘In today’s IP project implementations, the physical build and cabling is only half of the way,’ says Lawo Senior Product Manager for Media Infrastructure Control, Axel Kern. ‘The other half consists of configuration. Home significantly increases efficiency in setting up IP system installs.

‘Broadcasters and service providers are faced with constantly changing production demands, and setups need to adapt, no matter if on-premise or off-premise, local or remote, or even cloud. This new management platform provides the architecture for our customers to scale with their agile business requirements.’

Lawo’s Home platform is based on open standards, including ST2110, NMOS, IEEE802.1x and Radius, and follows Lawo’s LUX ‘unified experience’ design principles to provide consistent workflow across all Lawo IP products.

Home solves IP complexity with automatic plug-and-play discovery of IP audio and video devices, which are registered with their name, location, status and type. This applies not only to Lawo products but also to third-party solutions as well via NMOS. Discovered devices are managed in a central inventory list, ready for access and configuration.

With live broadcast environments requring operators to rely on speedy, unified device configuration routines – especially when setting generic device parameters or configuring senders and receivers – the ability to save and recall configurations is key. Home provides a centralised ‘mission control’ for these processes, allowing fast and unified access to device parameters for easy tweaking, irrespective of the end-point being controlled.

With a user-friendly UI, Home allows users to organise and access processing services. With all required facilities in one place, operators can set up and change stream configurations, and route them across an infrastructure without the need for a separate controller. For large infrastructures Home works with a broadcast controller in the same set-up and helps to speed up configuration and operation.

Home is based on LUX, a UI language common to all Lawo devices and many of their functionalities. Through Home’s user interface, operators can access and edit device parameters quickly using integral mechanisms that help get the job done efficiently.

The content created by a production crew and transported over a network is any operation’s most valuable asset. While a robust security system needs to cover all aspects of media infrastructure and content creation, the key lies in its simplicity. Home provides a variety of security strategies, first of which is quarantining unknown devices when they come online. Only after being deliberately approved, via an intuitive IEEE802.1X-based routine, can they begin exchanging signals with the Home network.

Home also uses an authentication strategy based on a central user management system, with dedicated user roles and groups. The LDAP based service allows users to authenticate either locally (within Home) or via a corporate IT infrastructure – Microsoft Active Directory. Finally comes the arbitration of devices and individual streams based on pinpointed rights management. Home’s architecture is prepared to manage services such as transport layer security, network segmentation and other IT security mechanisms such as Radius.

Home is cloud-native by design, which means that its architecture is built to run detached from hardware constraints. This does not automatically mean that services must be outsourced to an external service provider whose meter is running 24/7; with Home, the cloud starts on campus, private and locally, on COTS hardware. The Home platform is designed as functional blocks that provide microservices, which are self-contained and supply functionality to operators or other services.

Home can be expanded with additional services at any time to increase its functionality. Should there be a need for a larger RDS, because an installation grows, additional instances of required resources can be added. One of the core principles of Home is its focus on open standards wherever possible, for broadest compatibility and future-proof integration.

More: www.lawo.com