Sun abuses IPTV with Xeons, Opterons, switch and small dog

Nothing left to flog

By Ashlee Vance, 15th April 2008

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Sun Microsystems continues to go after streaming media types with a shedload of hardware.

The company this week refreshed its IPTV package that fits into its Streaming System product line with the latest and greatest silicon from Intel and AMD and an upgraded management package. The updated hardware/software combo can handle between 100 and 160,000 video streams at the same time. We're not quite sure why Sun picked 100 as its minimum. Surely, this IPTV unit could do 50 streams as well?

The new "platform" relies on the 1U Sun Fire X4150 server (quad-core Xeons), the 4U X4600 M2 server (Opterons) and the StorageTek 2530 storage unit. Sun then pairs all of this hardware with the X4950 Streaming Switch, which is a 14U box that was the brainchild of company co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

On top of the hardware, Sun will add Version 2.0 of its Streaming Software package for Solaris. The software, we're told, will scale from "500 to more than 1.5m subscribers and from 200 to more than 1m hours of content." So, if you only have 250 subscribers and 100 hours of content, you're screwed.

Down the road, Sun plans to make versions of this streaming package available with its Netra servers, which are built for telecommunications customers. It's also looking to offer up speedy flash-based storage as an option.

Sun has some big wins with the streaming set, including MLB.com - the successful baseball site that does a wide range of audio and video.

You can scope the streaming gear here.®

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