NAB: Sun Streamlines Video Streaming for Service Providers

Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual conference unveiled a purely server-based video streaming package that lowers the entry cost and expands delivery options for service providers.

By developing a lower-end alternative to its high-end switch and connected servers system announced last summer, Sun is headed down market with a scalable unit that can be deployed more flexibly to cut content carriage costs and deliver streaming media such as video on demand (VoD) to a broader base more effectively.

“Service providers hope to scale up but no one wants the risk of starting with a massive deployment,” said Karen Liu, vice-president of components and video technologies at Ovum RHK. “It’s absolutely true that a full range is what you want available as a service provider. The stress that video services place on service provider infrastructure plays to Sun's historical strength in high-performance telecom hardware.”

Though VoD offers revenue opportunities (pay-per-view movies and events, advertising and interactivity), beyond simple service subscriptions, many telcos have complained that they’re caught in a chicken-and-egg situation that forced them to hold off on VoD infrastructure because of it’s high price and limited flexibility.

A smaller video streaming system, that can be expanded from a single server to several, minus the high-end package’s switch, gives operators greater flexibility in the architectures they choose to employ in delivering media to either highly-concentrated or geographically dispersed groups of media customers. The smaller configuration can be used to deliver premium content to a limited-size base while a larger setup can be used to deliver more general content to a large customer group.

Sun said the new system, which can deliver as few as 100 standard definition (SD) streams to up to 160,000 concurrent SD streams (40,000 high definition streams), can start with one server and comprises as many as 14 units. It’s available now.

“The new system is still high end in terms of its capabilities, but now servers do the streaming without the switch,” explained Sandeep Agrawal, group marketing manager for IPTV at Sun. “We needed something smaller so we shrank the software down so it all fits on the same server which also handles the streaming.”

The vendor also hopes to make video deployments in general easier for service providers by adding flash-based options in July to the disk-based storage used in its server line, said Agrawal. This will let operators deploy servers even closer to customers.

The Sun streaming system includes the 1U Sun Fire X4150 server powered by Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, the 4U Sun Fire X4600 server powered by AMD Opteron processors, and the Sun StorageTek 2530 Array. Later in 2008, Sun said, the Sun software will also support carrier-grade Netra x64 servers.

A single X4150 configuration can support up to 2,500 simultaneous video streams, while while a 4U X4600 setup can support up to 25,000 concurrent unicast video streams simultaneously, said Agrawal.

Ovum’s Liu points out that the core issues of scalability hit numerous aspects of video service deployments and likes Sun’s approach, believing it’s smarter to move down than scale up.

“There have been concerns about scaling of IPTV, perhaps more on middleware and client interactions than on the streaming,” noted Liu. “Regarding scaling generally though, some vendors responses to concerns have been to say ‘come on, we could scale easily by going to bigger servers, we just haven't needed to.’ Sun started from the other end. The one gripe I had at the time was that the system announced last year also need to scale down. Now they've done that.”

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