Toshiba has developed NPEngine, a hardware engine for
streaming servers that directly delivers video content
from SSD to IP networks, without accessing the server's
CPU or memory resources.
The NPEngine can simultaneously deliver up to 64,000 high
quality video streams at a rate of 40Gigabit per sec, far
surpassing the performance of a typical server, and
reducing power consumption, the number of servers and the
space required.
The idea behind designing the NPEngine is to offload the
CPU and memory resources of a server used for streaming
video over IP networks to PCs, tablet PCs, smartphones
and Smart TVs. Current servers handle streaming with
software, utilizing the server's integrated CPU and
SDRAM. This limits the number of video streams that can
be delivered simultaneously to approximately 20,000 on a
typical 2RU server, the workhorse among compact size
servers. With these limitations, the solution to handle
hundreds of thousands of streams at once has been to
increase the number of servers.
Toshiba's NPEngine provides an alternative that
eliminates burdens on server CPU and memory resources by
delivering video content stored on SSD directly to IP
networks. This direct delivery also boosts the number of
high quality video streams that can be delivered at once
to 64,000 at 40Gb per sec. This not only more than
triples the performance of a 2RU server, it also cuts
space requirements by 70% and power consumption by 77%,
for server arrays supporting simultaneous delivery of
1,000,000 video streams.
NPEngine is also compliant with the newest HTTP adaptive
bit rate streaming without any modification of existing
HTTP streaming applications.
Server products running NPEngine will be available this
year.