As the companies surrounding the Flash memory market fall into a steep spiral, brought on by a completely oversupplied market, more so than the recession, we have always said to expect more and more applications to emerge which rely on Flash, especially in high volumes.
One way to dump huge amounts of Flash memory is to include chips in TV sets to supply pause TV, a crude version of a DVR, or to replace disk rives in PCs. Much of the industry capacity is going towards inflating handset storage so that vast libraries of multimedia can be carried around in your pocket.
But another which first emerged 15 months ago, from Swedish VoD server maker Edgeware, is to use large quantities of Flash to create a solid state disk for VoD servers. This week, long time favorite in this market, Israeli company BitBand, decided that Edgeware had enough of a market lead and also leapt into this self same business, something which last February cable VoD specialist SeaChange International also copied and got its first installation at Cablevision Mexico. We wondered at the time if Edgeware would launch a patent suit and now the same thought occurs regarding BitBand.
This means that about half of the major VoD players have come out with a Flash based VoD server product, leaving the nCube range within Arris, and Harmonic’s Entone and Cisco’s Arroyo still offering disk based systems only, while Motorola, which snapped up Broadbus as a VoD server company, has a less very different architecture which relies on massive amounts of cheap RAM, loaded from inexpensive disks. IPTV VoD player Kasenna was acquired this year by set top applications company Espial, and seems pretty much out of the VoD race.
Edgeware managed to get its first tier 1 telco to buy into the product last March then TeliaSonera deployed Edgeware’s Orbit 2x servers which run up to 20 Gbps, and offers more than 16,000 concurrent users per server.
When VoD systems were first deployed they were 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, before Edgeware took the final step into cheap, low power, but reliable, Flash. This September Edgeware added its Reflex range which uses the same type of servers, doubled up, so they can offer 32,000 concurrent streams, over the public internet using the HTTP protocol.
BitBand’s new product is based on off the shelf Linux hardware and is called Vision Ti4. The system incorporates BitBand’s tiered caching concept, which places popular video out on the edge of a network each being fed from a central storage hub. This architecture has always been one of BitBand’s strengths and was developed initially at first customer Fastweb in Italy. If it takes off in Flash, it could lead to a huge number of Flash based appliances placed around an IPTV network. The company says that its new server can stream at up to 30 Gigabits per second, but gave few other details.