Date: 26-Nov-2009   URL: www.sun.com/servers/networking/streamingsystem/features.xml

Sun Streaming System

Features and Benefits

Move up to the extreme performance, scalability, and flexibility of the Sun Streaming System to deliver personalized, high-value services to more subscribers faster. Now, subscriber profiling, permission-based advertising, personal video recording, and video on demand are within easy reach.


Key Benefits

  • Cost-effective, non-disruptive growth
  • High speed memory-based streaming
  • High-density, low-cost industry-standard storage
  • Open standards design maintains flexibility
  • Integrated 10 GbE accelerates performance and saves money
  • Designed-in redundancy for carrier grade reliability

Unmatched Scalability

Revolutionary design

The Sun Streaming System video delivery systems offer a single software platform based on Sun's innovative x64 hardware enabling operators to scale from a few hundreds of subscribers to millions. Maximum flexibility for scaling up subscribers and content independently lets operators design their infrastructure today while planning for Sun's innovative future x64 systems.

Launch and deliver new services faster

With the Sun Streaming System, you can provide personalized unicast streaming to every television set. This means that you can deliver new services that are customized by subscriber, such as personalized content, permission-based subscriber profiling, targeted permission-based advertising, time-shifted television and network personal video recording (nPVR), with traditional broadcast video on demand.

Cost-effective deployment

The Sun Streaming System can help you generate revenue quickly. Traditional video streaming solutions can take a big bite out of your profits: Large capital expenditures and the operating costs associated with managing and maintaining them can limit the ability to deliver new services. We designed the Sun Streaming System to protect your assets and maximize profits. In fact, it offers the lowest cost-basis in the industry. It's also the first video delivery-over-IP platform to achieve cost-effectiveness across four areas:

  • Streaming
  • Storage
  • Control
  • Network integrated optical transport

What's our secret?

The Sun Streaming System gives you six distinct technology advantages:

  • Cost-effective
  • Memory-based streaming
  • High-density, low-cost industry-standard storage
  • Open Standards APIs
  • Integrated 10 GbE
  • Designed-in redundancy carrier grade reliability
Sun has a high degree of expertise in each of these areas, and we've integrated and optimized the Sun Streaming System components and software to uniquely solve the industry's streaming technology and cost issues.


Flexible Deployment

Streaming software makes your job easier

The six distributed Sun Streaming Software applications, based on open industry standards, are responsible for key streaming functionalities and serve as a point of Sun Streaming System integration in the Video Headend.

Included capabilities:

  • Support for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC(H.264)
  • Content at any bit rate from 1Mbps to 20Mbps for video streams
  • SD or HD in PAL or NTSC formats
  • Content ingest: FTP and FTP/UDP encrypted or clear
  • Trick Play at six speeds, 2500 events per second, scalable
  • nPVR content segmentation at import and fast-forward catch-up
  • Open standards interfaces for asset management via CORBA
  • Personalized streaming and advertisements
  • Content replication during import
  • Content Export

Capacity and capabilities you need now

The Sun Streaming System is the most affordable solution in streaming throughput. Its simple open software architecture running on a choice of Sun's x64 hardware platforms gives you the industry's most scalable video server, even those costing twice as much. For example, in its smallest form, the Sun Streaming system can support a few hundred streaming videos and scale to a large deployment that supports up to 160,000 2Mbps unicast streams simultaneously at the industry's cheapest price point. That's right—100 - 160,000 2Mbps streams per system, with a single software platform. That's an industry first that will save you money and let you grow as fast as you can.

Leverage the economies of scalability with flexibility

As for rapid growth, the capabilities of the Sun Streaming System Family help you redefine the economic model for video delivery. With this system's extreme capacity, scalability, and choice of hardware, your costs increase slower than the rate at which subscribers are added to the system. Just look at the economy of scale: You can grow the system incrementally, at your own pace, to support over 1.5 million subscribers and 1 million+ hours of content. Scale streaming, storage and ingest independently as you grow subscribers, content and channels for subscribers that increase your revenue.

Push the limits of growth

At the heart of the solution is the new Sun Streaming Software and your choice of the Sun Fire X4100 M2 Server ,Sun Fire X4150 Server, Sun Fire X4500 Data Server, Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server, or the Sun Fire X4950 Streaming Switch. The industry's only open industry standards based system, integrated, memory cache-based switching and streaming engine with 10 Gigabit Ethernet optical networking built-in.

Keep it lively with interactivity

The Sun Streaming System delivers exceptional interactive load performance, from 100 simultaneous streams up to 160,000 simultaneous streams, up to 2,500 trick-play events/sec and 1 million hours+ of storage.

The standards you want

The Sun Streaming System delivers extremely reliable, scalable, and cost-effective personalized television services entirely with open standards-based interfaces for interconnectivity, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4/AVC H.264, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, UDP/IP, and other Internet based protocols. The Sun Streaming System gives you industry-leading performance with a maximum streaming bandwidth of up to 320 Gbps.

DRAM-based streaming

Sun gives you DRAM cache speeds, scalable from 64GB to 2TB. That lets you take advantage of the industry's lowest cost per stream to deliver quality services faster. For example, hundreds of thousands of unicast streams per system with reliable, simple, cost-effective Quality of Service (QoS) management.

Wow your subscribers

High unicast capacity lets you personalize content for every subscriber without the burden of a large scale hardware infrastructure to install, manage and service. And with a high unicast capacity you can add new personalized services quickly and easily without taking down-time to reconfigure the equipment. That includes offering your subscribers the ultimate in video viewing with easy-to-select content and a simple installation.

Wow your bottom line

Customer satisfaction is great, but it has to come at a profit. The intelligently integrated Sun Streaming System lowers your CAPEX and OPEX, and shortcuts the time and inevitable cost of next-generation video services. The quicker you can deploy, the quicker you can count revenue.

Redefine your targets

With advertising revenues on the decline, targeted permission-based advertising has become more popular. The Sun Streaming System's ability to delivery a personalized unicast stream to every subscriber means that you can use permissions-based profiling to insert advertisements to a more targeted audience.


Reliable, Easy Management

Sun reliability designed in, Sun expertise on standby

Many of the components in this system drive very large, mission-critical systems around the world. They're designed for extreme availability through modular component reliability. Redundant, hot-swappable fans and power supplies, hot-pluggable disks, and management software ensure reliability and ease serviceability by design. We have a lot of experience with these components, and we can help you eliminate points of weakness or failure, boost uptime, and have a smooth headend integration experience.

An integrated end-to-end solution built on open platforms

The Sun Streaming System is built on an open software infrastructure that leverages industry-standard components, interfaces and protocols. That means you get to leverage Sun's long-term relationships with industry-leading software and hardware vendors to implement a complete, end-to-end ecosystem.

 
 
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