TV Band: Guidelines to the use of a cold standby automation

This paper is aimed to provide operators with the guidelines required to manually switch to the cold standby automation in case a failure occurs in the primary automation.

Introduction
Band, officially named Bandeirantes Network, is a Brazilian broadcast television network based in São Paulo. Aired for the first time in 1967, Band is now the fourth TV network in Brazil and it’s nationally available via terrestrial and satellite signal, and internationally via cable. Band forms part of the Bandeirantes Communications Group, a leading multimedia communications company that distributes content worldwide, offering to the most different markets the wide range of program genres that Brazil offer including telenovelas, series, realities, sports, documentaries, music, and many others.

Band Taubatè is an affiliate of the Band network that uses an Etere solution to manage in real-time the broadcast of commercial contents across three regional networks; in this scenario Etere Automation send on-air the main playlist whilst Etere Ad Insertion loads and sends on-air the commercial clusters marked by the automation as to be split into different networks.

In order to increase the level of redundancy of its playout automation system, the technical department of Band Taubatè has decided to implement a cold standby automation to be used as a failover server when the running primary automation server fails.

This paper is aimed to provide operators with the guidelines required to manually switch to the cold standby automation in case a failure occurs in the primary automation.

Using a Cold Standby Automation
The use of a cold standby automation is a redundancy method that involves having one automation server as a backup for the identical primary automation. The cold standby automation is available to be activated when a failure occurs in the primary automation. In this chapter will be detailed the preliminary requirements for ensuring a correct functioning of the cold standby automation as well as the steps required to switch to it.

Preliminary requirements
In order to use a cold standby automation to increase the redundancy of the automation system it’s needed that the following prerequisites are satisfied:
■ The primary automation must be configured in the AUMAIN1 server which IP address is 10.4.12.11
■ The cold standby automation must be configured in the AD1 server which IP address is 10.4.12.12
■ The cold standby automation must be configured to have the same resources as the primary automation
■ The cold standby automation must be turned off (i.e. closed) until needed, that is, until the primary server stops running