Sun introduced the Sun Streaming System, its massively scalable and cost-effective video delivery platform for cable and telecommunications operators.

Unveiled at the 6th annual Tribeca Film Festival in Lower Manhattan, the system leverages the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) to deliver the highest video streaming capacity in the industry by enabling cost-effective personalized video delivery over existing optical network infrastructure.

The Sun Streaming System supports up to 160,000 simultaneous, unique video streams at the rate of 2Mbps and a price of less than $50 per stream for complete video headend, which is approximately 10 times the streaming capacity of competitive platforms. Thirty-two integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet optical networking ports combine multiplexing, switching and routing all in one high-density video streaming package.

The Sun Streaming System is an integrated platform that is composed of a distributed software suite running on Sun Fire x64 systems, storage and switching technologies. Key components of the Sun Streaming System are the new Sun Streaming Software, the new Sun Fire X4950 Streaming Switch, the Sun Fire X4500 data server and the Sun Fire X4100 systems.

Based on open industry standards, the Sun Streaming Software is a single point of control to operate and manage the entire video streaming system. The software supports more than 20 video streaming features, such as: MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats; bit-rate support from 1Mbps to 20 Mbps; standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) streaming; encrypted and clear content streaming; at least six trick-play settings; Network Personal Video Recorder (nPVR) capabilities; and splicing and personalized playlists for permission-based target advertising. Open software standards, such as CORBA, XML, HTTP and RTSP, allow operators to easily integrate third-party components for an end-to-end video headend solution.

A scalable memory cache-based content switching and streaming engine, the Sun Fire X4950 Streaming Switch provides the highest available streaming density at 320 Gbps and up to 2 terabytes (TB) of memory to enable scalable video streaming with a low cost per stream.

The Sun Fire X4500 server powered by Second-Generation AMD Opteron processors delivers the performance of a four-way x64 server and the highest storage density available, with 24 TB of storage in seven inches of rack space for up to 9,400 hours of 2Mbps video content storage.

Sun is aligning with several resellers, partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), including EDS and Nortel, to bring the Sun Streaming System’s market-changing economics to customers in the video services industry.