In the beginning VoD was delivered from a single central server somewhere in a pay TV network. Later, in IPTV, a distributed architecture was put in place by companies like BitBand. Broadbus came along and decided that all of the VoD files should be pre-loaded into ram to make them faster to serve, but at IBC this week we saw the next step, a 6 terrabyte Flash memory VoD appliances from Edgeware.
The Stockholm based company broke onto the IPTV scene almost exactly a year ago when it announced its Orbit range of VoD servers which began shipping this February, and already at the show middleware companies have completed integrations with the Edgeware VoD systems and the company is readying its second generation of devices.
James Wilkinson, Senior VP of sales, rattled off the benefits of the new approach, ‘We get 3 Terabytes now, 6 Terabytes in our new system, in a single rack mounted unit. For other technologies to achieve the same storage they would take 20 to 30 racks and use 3 to 5 kilowatts of power. Our unit uses just 85 watts.’ He says the devices save around $6,000 to $7,000 just in the fact that air conditioning isn’t required for the racks.
‘The system can output at 20 Gbps and has its video pump burned into hardware and we are on the verge of announcing a tier 1 telco in Europe,’ said Wilkinson. So far the company has just one installation at Maxisat in Finland. The hardware based video pump that Wilkinson refers to appears to be based on an FPGA from Altera and the company has already integrated it with the Verimatrix IPTV DRM system.
Part of the trick of the system is working out parallel paths into the flash memory in order to sustain the high output rate, so that requires a special Flash chip run. Unlike the ram based Broadbus system, which must be loaded from inexpensive attached disks, the Orbit just accepts a copy of a film from a distribution platform and stores it there. Since flash survives around 100,000 read writes Wilkinson reckons that these devices will offer 9 years mean time between failure,
The system can ingest video at 600 mbps and can play it out in 4 trick play speeds for implementation of nPVR applications. No pricing was given but Wilkinson says they cost $25 in capex for each 2 Mbps stream capability, which sounds like it would repay its costs in just a few months, if not weeks.