Entone Technologies and Hewlett-Packard have teamed up to make HP’s Integrity Superdome server line available as a video-on-demand platform with a per-server capacity of over 100gbps.
“We’ve had the Integrity in the market for a number of years supporting high-volume transactions in many industries,” says Peggy Dau, manager for HP’s network service provider, broadband and media solutions business. “Entone’s collaboration with us allows us to see how we can tweak the system to make it viable for VOD.”
The 100+gbps capacity translates into the ability to simultaneously deliver more than 27,400 MPEG-2 video streams at 3.75mbps per stream or more than 50,000 MPEG-4 streams at 2mbps per stream, executives say. Dau says HP was open to making the Integrity available to other VOD suppliers but that, so far, Entone is the only company offering the system for this application.
“There was a time when deploying a video server of this scale was impractical due to technical and cost limitations,” says Tim Warren, Entone CTO. “By working closely with HP for the past 18 months, we have jointly developed a solution that sets a new performance and total-cost-of-ownership standard for the industry.”
Entone has layered its Streamliner XL architecture and Armada asset management software onto the Windows Server 2003 OS of the Integrity Entone to create a VOD platform sufficient to the needs of telcos and MSOs alike, no matter what the balance of resource allocations might be between random access memory (RAM) and disk-based memory, says Mark Evanson, vice president for product development at Entone.
“This is a massively scalable platform that can run as many as 128 Intel Itanium 2 processors,” Evanson says. “You can start at whatever level of capacity you need and continue expanding to unprecedented levels. Rather than having to store a piece of content on many servers as you scale up, you can store it on one server and distribute it to your entire market as that market grows.”
With up to a terabyte of RAM and vast amounts of disk storage, the server resources can be allocated dynamically and automatically as demand for content shifts from high to low volume, Evanson notes. This is a cost-effective solution that leverages a hardware platform that is used in many industries, he adds. “You don’t need a purpose-built piece of hardware anymore,” he says.
For telcos just getting into video services, the Integrity offers a single-platform architecture for expanding to ever larger footprints from a single server location, Evanson says. Alternatively, cable companies who already have VOD servers in place can turn to the Integrity platform as they move into network-based personal video recording services, where the high streaming capacity of RAM-based servers will be needed to accommodate volume demand for very popular time-shifted programming.
“I expect our solution will co-exist with legacy VOD platforms for awhile in the cable market,” he says. Over time these servers would also be employed to deliver content offered from the legacy servers as the disk-based systems die out, he adds.
