VOD server company, Broadbus Technologies, has launched version 3.0 of its flagship product combo, the Broadbus B-1 Video server with Stream Commander. (Note: Broadbus claims that the B-1 Video Server can scale to up to 80 Gbps of throughput via independent Gigabit Ethernet ports, and can deliver up to 19,200 MPEG-2 streams per server–i.e. 38,400 streams per rack–while ingesting hundreds of channels of live and pre-recorded content. The server takes advantage of an ultra-wide memory architecture and an advanced software-management system to completely eliminate the use of hard drives as streaming engines, instead using DRAM as an access device and hard drives purely as a storage device: Broadbus claims that this approach, in addition to providing the B-1 with an extremely high content-ingest capacity, reduces total cost of ownership, allows a much smaller footprint, and improves reliability. Stream Commander, meanwhile, is a management application, designed to configure, coordinate and monitor up to 256 networked B-1 video servers via a Web-based GUI. It manages all ingest, storage and streaming activities and maintains an active database of configuration profiles and status, alarm, stream and content statistics. It also manages the propagation of content to and from near-term storage libraries, virtually eliminating, Broadbus claims, content replication.)
According to the company, the new version offers improvements in the areas of fault tolerance, application resiliency and reporting functions, together with a number of manageability enhancements based on customer feedback. Specifically, the improvements include hot-swappable blades with full failover capability; hot-swappable, redundant fiber channel controllers; improved diagnostics; application and process-level resiliency; and the ability to stream live television within five seconds of ingest. "The new fault-tolerance features extend our advantage over PC component-based and disk-based systems, meeting the high reliability standards put forth by service providers," Broadbus’s senior director of marketing, Tom Kennedy, said in a prepared statement. "Rigorous independent testing and analysis has shown that the Broadbus B-1 exceeds 99.999 percent uptime, demonstrating our system’s ability to provide the same level of reliability for video that customers have come to expect from voice and data. In addition to reliability enhancements, based on feedback from customers we architected version 3.0 of the B-1 and Stream Commander to provide more robust information for capacity planning and management through enhanced reporting and alarms."
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