Sun Microsystems today announced an expansion of its Streaming System video portfolio that adds small to midscale streaming of television and IP-based video to create an IPTV system that can scale from 100 to 160,000 simultaneous streams. The goal is to give service providers building new video delivery networks cost-effective options for growing their business seamlessly at a pace that makes sense for them, said Sandeep Agrawal, group marketing manager of IP video delivery for Sun.

The Sun Streaming System is an integrated system composed of Sun Streaming Software that runs on servers as well as storage and switching devices. Sun Streaming Software version 2 allows service providers to grow their systems from as small as 500 subscribers up to 1.5 million, while enabling from 200 hours of content up to 1 million hours of content. Using the same software framework, service providers can choose off-the-shelf hardware for servers, storage and networking from 1RU to 14RU.

“Shrinking the software down so that all the functions of the software can operate on smaller servers is what is new here,” Agrawal said. “Now, service providers can scale from very low to very high by just changing hardware underneath.”

Being able to make those changes seamlessly, without disrupting service or doing forklift upgrades is important to telecom service providers and others, including the hospitality industry and municipal governments, who may need to start small but be prepared to grow as demand warrants, Agrawal said.

The Sun system enables service providers to independently scale streaming capabilities, storage capabilities, ingest capabilities and interactivity. That kind of flexibility is required in a market when the next new thing is unknown, Agrawal said.

On the content side, Sun is enabling storage scaling from 1Tb to 1.5Pb of storage. It is enabling 1.5Mb/s per 1RU for ingest, recognizing there are now many sources of video content, Agrawal said. And Sun is enabling up to 2500 session requests per rack unit as well to recognize the growing need for interactivity.

“We have been designing a software architecture that could take advantage of off-the-shelf servers, storage and networking — specifically ours — in such a way that these customers’ applications could grow very organically and without worrying about the constraints of the video streaming hardware and software,” Agrawal said. “Most vendors that deliver a video pump make an assumption about amount of content and interactivity that is going to be enjoyed by the viewer. As soon as that business model changes, that product becomes more of a problem, retrofitting it to the next level is a pain. A big part of our design goal is to make sure these things can scale modularly and independently.”

Ingest is particularly important in areas such as the surveillance industry where video from many unmanned cameras feeds into a central system. Interactivity is also important as telcos and others seek to create targeted advertising, he added.

“In both telcos and the hospitality segment, where they are very interested in doing targeted advertising based on remote-click behavior, they want to be able to monitor what ads the viewer skips past, where they dwell,” Agrawal said. Using an automated rules engine in the back of the network, the service provider can start to “push out programming choices and modify the electronic programming guide in real time. Both telcos and hospitality customers are experimenting with this.”

The goal is still highly personalized televison that can be shared over multiple screens, he said.

The Sun Streaming System includes the 1RU Sun Fire X4150 server, the 4RU Sun Fire X4600 server and the Sun StorageTek 2530 Array. Coming later this year is support for carrier-grade Netra x64 servers, Netra ATCA x64 blade servers and options to include flash-based storage from Sun.

Because discs are mechanical spinning platters, Agrawal said, telcos have concerns about deploying them in unmanned facilities such as central offices and prefer the flash-based storage.

Finally, Sun is working with its partners to push openness that can speed the development of new services, Agrawal said.