SeaChange Debuts Its First Flash Memory Server

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SeaChange says it will unveil its flash memory solution for on-demand television next week at The Cable Show. The industry leader’s new MediaServer Flash Streamer is a 100-percent flash memory-based solution that completely decouples on-demand streaming from disk-based content storage, empowering television operators to push their streaming resources to the network edge and deploy centralized content libraries. Available in the third quarter of 2007, a single SeaChange MediaServer Flash Streamer (two rack units high) provides 300 hours of storage and 1,000 streams.

It perfects a new solution for:
- Diskless edge streaming at the network edge for the most popular content in the "long tail", thereby enabling centralized storage and storage management at headends.
- Time-shifted TV reliability: In contrast to DRAM solutions, the Flash Streamer retains real-time ingested content in spite of server failures or maintenance downtime, a critical requirement for time-shifting.
- Seamless stream expansion allowing operators to boost streaming capacity without adding disk storage. SeaChange’s new Axiom Core 4.0 automatically distributes "hot" content to Flash Streamers to provide additional streaming capacity.

SeaChange’s patented MediaCluster technology first set the standard for video-on-demand cost-per-stream by clustering inexpensive disk servers to far outperform monolithic enterprise servers. Today, SeaChange’s MediaServer Flash Streamer is also the industry’s only completely non-volatile flash memory streaming solution (no spinning disks) to take full advantage of SeaChange’s widely proven MediaCluster server architecture. Without costly mirroring, MediaCluster stripes content files across flash modules in a server and across servers in an InfiniBand connected cluster, ensuring service fault-resilience and cost-efficient scalability since only one copy of a video is ever required at a server location.

MediaCluster technology is also the key to extending flash memory’s life expectancy by a factor of five to at least 10 years. Whereas content "write" hot spots would dramatically reduce life expectancy in any other architecture, SeaChange’s MediaCluster eliminates write hot spots by perfectly load-balancing content "writes" across all flash modules in a server and across all servers in a cluster.

Next week, SeaChange will also introduce its Axiom Core 4.0, the latest generation on-demand management software that optimizes the performance of disk-based servers as well as memory resources such as the Flash Streamer. Taking its cues from the experience of delivering billions of on-demand streams in more than 100 diverse settings, the new Axiom Core 4.0 is an open solution that automates television’s rapidly expanding core services and seamlessly manages the next generation applications including network PVR and broadband PC/mobile delivery and subscriber place-shifting.

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