How Cisco IT Uses IP Multicasting Globally

Like many global corporations, one of Cisco's many challenges is to communicate effectively with employees around the globe by delivering timely and rich company videos, trainings, executive broadcasts and video transcripts of meetings. The right solution had to be scalable and support hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously - delivering video, graphics, and large-scale Web content without burdening enterprise networks that also handled mission critical business applications. The solution was IP Multicast - a network technology that enables multiple receivers to get identical copies of the same data stream at the same time, without putting more than one copy of the stream on any single network link. Today Cisco employees enjoy rich media broadcasts, sometimes daily.