Hitachi announced today that it has developed an Input/Output (I/O) control technology for streaming-optimized storage (storage equipped with video delivery functionalities) that can deliver 1,200 streams of High Definition (HD) video simultaneously on its prototype.

The performance is more than 10 times as high as conventional UNIX-based OS, and more than 3 times higher than the company's previous prototype released in 2007. Hitachi has developed this technology by improving its original real-time OS that manages video data I/Os in the storage. The video delivery performance has been enhanced by improving storage I/O efficiency of the OS, which now fully utilizes multi-core CPU capabilities. This high performance is achieved only using software, without any streaming-proprietary hardware requirements. This technology enables larger amount of video data to be handled by a storage system, thus drastically reducing the amount of equipment necessary for a large video delivery service, which leads to not only equipment and management cost savings, but also environmental impact reduction of the service.

The generalization of broadband networks has enabled HD video to be delivered over IP networks. However, due to the challenges of a growing customer base as well as customer expectations in terms of video quality, the workload of video delivery services has been greatly increased. Service providers are faced with an increase of the amount of equipments necessary to handle video delivery, leading to equipment and management cost increase, as well as a serious environmental impact of the service because of the high power consumption of the equipment used.

In response to this demand, Hitachi has developed an I/O control technology (real-time OS) for optimizing storage performance for streaming, which improves video delivery performance by fully utilizing the capabilities of the underlying hardware. Hitachi has implemented a prototype of a streaming-optimized storage with this technology based on Hitachi midrange storage product, and measured that this prototype can deliver up to 12Gbps of video data (1,200 streams of 10Mbps HD video).

Hitachi presented this technology at the 19th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV'09), which was held from June 3rd to 5th 2009, in Williamsburg, USA (VA).