(21 April 2008 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Sun Microsystems is expanding its Sun Streaming System product portfolio, creating what it claims is an IPTV platform that can scale seamlessly and cost-effectively from 100 to 160,000 simultaneous streams.

Joining Sun Fire X4950 Streaming Switch are new server and storage platforms for small to mid-scale streaming of television and IP-based video. Sun also announced Sun Streaming Software Release 2, which leverages the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), enabling customers to scale economically from 500 to more than 1.5 million subscribers, and from 200 to over one million hours of content.

With these new platforms the Sun Streaming System now offers the industry’s broadest scalability and flexibility to service providers building out new video delivery networks. Customers can now configure and grow very diverse deployments and service offerings with a single software framework running on the right-sized servers, storage and networking from 1U to 14U. This not only simplifies deployment planning and network management, but also prevents service disruptions as deployments grow.

Sun Microsystems senior directorc for storage servers and IPTV Graham Lovell says, "The Sun Streaming System is the only streaming product family on the market today to offer customers both disruptive economics and non-disruptive growth at nearly any scale point - giving customers the ability to evolve their networks and services without the pain of major retrofits or integrations.

"Sun’s innovation makes us uniquely positioned to serve the needs of IPTV service providers and bring consumers the latest video technologies such as personalized video and social networking"

The Sun Streaming System includes the 1U Sun Fire X4150 server powered by Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, the 4U Sun Fire X4600 M2 server powered by AMD Opteron processors, and the Sun StorageTek 2530 Array. Later in 2008, the Sun Streaming Software will also support carrier-grade Netra x64 servers, Netra ATCA x64 blade servers, and options to include flash-based storage from Sun -- enabling customers to deploy extremely high reliability and performance caching in remote and lights-out environments.

These new server and storage options offer service providers the maximum flexibility to independently scale streaming capacity, content capacity, ingest rates and degree of user interactivity as the needs of the subscribers evolve.

Sun adds that partners and customers continue to validate the breakthrough economics of the Sun Streaming System. Customers deploying the Sun Streaming System today include Media Partners International (MPI), the provider of video streaming services in Bangkok, and Building B, a US-based entertainment technology and services company.

Building B is working with Sun and Harris to deploy its next-generation video services to service providers using the new Sun Streaming Software Release 2 running on the Sun Fire X4600 M2 and Sun Fire X4150 servers - a solution that offers the lowest cost and power consumption and highest streaming capacity on the smallest hardware configuration possible.

Building B president and co-founder Phil Wiser says, "Building B has created a platform that is at the forefront of next-generation television, bringing together the best TV, movies and the Internet to deliver a comprehensive and modern home entertainment experience. Our network operations requires a flexible, yet small footprint solution that delivers high streaming performance at any scale.

"The Sun Streaming System and its new expanded product family provides a reliable, flexible and scalable architecture allowing Building B to cost-effectively deliver a highly advanced and personal television service to consumers".