Streaming Media Partners Europe

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The ability to quickly spot and act on opportunities is an essential ingredient in a company’s success. Streaming Media Partners Europe, in Amsterdam, was not only able to anticipate the requirements for Live and On-Demand streaming over the Internet, but it has also taken up the challenge to meet and feed that demand. With the help of Sun and Sun Advantage Partners, the Dutch company has built a full-featured Flash-based streaming CDN that’s solidified its reputation as a premier service provider. Streaming Media Partners Europe delivers high-end services for Flash video, on-demand audio/video streaming, live webcasts, videoconferencing, videoconverting, e-learning, multiplayer games, and other rich media productions.

Streaming Media Partners Europe started with NetMasters BV, in which all hosting activities were performed and are still done. As workloads increased, activities were split and NetMasters BV became part of Streaming Media Partners Europe. By 2003, the company's focus was hosting the Flash Communications Server from Macromedia (Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia in 2005 and developed the Flash Media Server 2).

“From experience we knew that customers with high amounts of traffic would have problems with the disk I/O. When we turned to Sun and its partner Dataman International B.V., we came to the conclusion that Wowza with Sun equipment would be a good solution. From there, the Sun Try & Buy program helped us test this combination and prove our theory,”says Gert Janssen, operations manager at Streaming Media Partners Europe.

That’s when Janssen and his team turned to Sun and its partner Dataman International BV. The company now uses Sun StorageTek arrays and Sun UltraSPARC servers that run the Flash platform. For virtualization purposes they also have a separate VMware platform that includes a combination of two-socket Sun x64 servers and a StorageTek array.

Together, Streaming Media Partners Europe, Sun, and Dataman developed a superior streaming platform, suitable for high I/O and high throughput. “The platform used a Sun UltraSPARC server and Sun StorageTek array solution. The storage array has fiber disks that handle the disk I/O very well, and the Sun UltraSPARC server is excellent for handling streaming traffic,” says Janssen. “The new system opened up new possibilities for us, and straight away after we began thinking about how best to keep up with the demands of live video.” The answer for Streaming Media Partners Europe was to create a fresh hosting platform for live and on-demand Flash-streaming CDN services.

In the initial planning stages in 2007, Streaming Media Partners Europe looked at a third party vendor and another Sun partner, Wowza Media Systems LLC. The Java-based Wowza Media Server Pro works with the Solaris Operating System, and the combination with Sun servers enables the highest-performing Flash-based streaming server solution on the market. “We were impressed by the entire package with Sun and Wowza: it created a reliable, scalable, full-featured Flash-based streaming CDN. Crucially for us, other solutions would have been more expensive,” says Janssen.

Wowza didn’t release its Media Server Pro software until April 2007, but within two months — and with only two in-house employees setting up the system — Streaming Media Partners Europe’s new infrastructure was up and running. In that same month, the company was hosting its first customer, a Belgium radio station streaming live MP3 audio worldwide. The company also took advantage of Sun’s Try & Buy program (try Sun products free for 60 days and then buy at 25–45% off list price) to host a live video Webcast of the Royal Netherlands Football Association (KNVB) cup final between AZ Alkmaar and AJAX Amsterdam. “The new platform easily handled the high and fluctuating demands of the football (soccer) fans,” says Janssen. “We delivered an engaging multi-stream experience where fans could switch in real time between the ‘director's cut’ view of the game and the three additional live camera feeds from different parts of the stadium to get a unique perspective on the match.”

Streaming Media Partners Europe saw a return on its Sun investment within nine months. Furthermore, the company didn’t fully begin appreciating the low space and power demands of the Sun servers until after the system was already in place. Janssen says, “In the datacenter where we’re located, the power consumption has gone up very rapidly, and we had difficulties getting the right amount of amps. So we actually downsized our datacenter facility with our Sun hardware and by using the VMware solution to transfer customers into a virtual private server rather than having their own dedicated server running for them.” Janssen estimates the company is saving 20–30% of its annual energy costs through energy efficiency.

Streaming Media Partners Europe was growing at a rapid rate, and by June 2008, it was ready to host live streaming media for the UEFA European Football Championship, Euro 2008. Janssen comments, “Our customer was the Supporters Club of the Dutch football team, SupportersClub Oranje. We were able to set up the account immediately and within two days they started streaming live media to 3,000 concurrent users with the ability to handle traffic peaks of over 10 Gb/sec. That high traffic load is unusual now, but as we stream more live sporting events and concerts, we expect to regularly handle 20,000 concurrent users or more. We’ve benchmarked that figure, and I’ve no doubt we have the infrastructure to handle those loads without interruption.”

Not a company to rest on its laurels, Streaming Media Partners Europe is now working on its next big idea: a partnership with Sun and Dataman to create a distributed model for live and on-demand Flash CDN services. “We started the project in April and expect to have it up and running in four to six months. Sun is delivering the hardware on the project, Dataman is providing its expertise, and we’ll deliver the solution on top of that. The three of us can bring a true CDN to the market that is fully embedded into a customer’s environment. One of the main reasons we’ve been working with Sun is that the solution is so scalable, and because of that, the sky’s the limit for us,” says Janssen.