Kasenna announced a breakthrough in streaming video-on-demand (VOD) performance that enables service providers and cable operators to slash deployment and management costs for "metro-scale" triple play offerings. Using mainstream web-farm style clustering technologies with built-in redundancy and reliability, the cluster can power a half-million subscriber deployment from a single video head office (VHO) using MPEG-4 (AVC) streams encoded at 2.3 Mbps. The benchmark tests used 12 dual processor servers based on the 64-bit Intel Xeon processor (3.4 GHz) powered by Kasenna MediaBase version 8.1 software that incorporates hybrid RAM/Disk streaming. Achieving 135 Gbps of streaming capacity, which equated to 57,600 MPEG-4 streams at 2.3 Mbps per stream and 36,000 MPEG-2 streams using 3.75 Mbps encoding (Cable Labs specification), the performance characteristics from this benchmark are unprecedented in the industry.

"This benchmark demonstrates that video-on-demand systems can scale to support very large numbers of subscribers with a manageable number of servers," said Bob Larribeau, Sr. Analyst at the Multimedia Research Group. "It shows that riding the curve of mainstream technology development produces high-performance systems for IPTV service providers."

The benchmark was observed under real-world demand conditions using actual traffic from a VOD deployment and all mainstream components -- loosely coupled (web-farm style) Linux servers, standard file systems, standard gigabit-Ethernet interconnect technologies for intra-server interconnects, etc. Kasenna's patent-pending Stream Clustering technology that incorporates a number of different algorithms for pre-caching, hot-spot measurements, load averaging and request arrival predictions, guaranteed the load balancing among the cluster. For more information, request the Kasenna white paper, "Observed VOD Usage Patterns and Their Implications on Large-Scale VOD System Design," from the white paper section at www.kasenna.com.

"While other IPTV solution vendors focus on specialized hardware designs or very high server counts when attempting to deliver metro-class performance, Kasenna's vision has always been to use software intelligence and a distributed architecture to enable a high-performance, more cost-effective, and scalable solution," said Dr. Satish Menon, Chief Technology Officer of Kasenna. "This new benchmark is a testament of the validity of that vision."

Significantly, the benchmark was achieved using off-the-shelf servers, proving once again that Kasenna's open standards approach to IPTV solutions delivers premium performance. "Intel's Xeon processors deliver extremely high performance for advanced media solutions without resorting to proprietary hardware," said Rick Brown, Director of Marketing for Volume Platforms, Server Platform Group, Intel Corporation. "This new benchmark illustrates that by using an open systems approach with memory-based streaming, leading software vendors like Kasenna can offer service providers high levels of performance while minimizing capital expenditures."