Slicer Failover

Slicer Failover minimizes the impact on your viewers' playback experience when a Slicer's performance is sub-optimal. It automatically switches the live stream's source to a different Slicer. This is possible because each Slicer in a Failover Group provides status information to the system at frequent intervals. If the primary Slicer is unhealthy, the system switches the source of the live stream to a different Slicer. This may cause viewers to experience a few seconds of discontinuity.

This feature is supported for Live Slicers only. Live Events are not included in the Slicer Failover solution at this time.

Slicers can be enabled in Hot-Hot, Hot-Warm, or Flexible Hot-Warm configuration:

With Hot-Hot, all Slicers perform full encode and storage, allowing near-instantaneous failover.
With Hot-Warm, only the primary Slicer performs a full encode to save cost, but there may be seconds of slate when failover occurs.
With Flexible Hot-Warm, you can specify how many Hot Slicer backups are desired with the rest in Warm standby for the best balance between cost and user experience.

Slicer Failover can run in Prioritized, Flat, or Custom Mode:

In Prioritized Mode, each Slicer has a priority to control the failover order and automatically fails back when a higher-priority Slicer becomes healthy again. An override is provided to prevent this failback from occurring.
In Flat Mode, when failover occurs, any healthy Slicer is used (randomly chosen) and no automatic failback occurs.
In Custom Mode, multiple Slicers can share the same priority so there is no automatic failback to a Slicer with the same priority as the active Slicer.

Slicer Failover also detects TR 101 290 errors to trigger failover based on MPEG transport stream errors.

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