New Hardware Broadens Streaming Server Market

As the range of choices and capabilities in the server market broadens, streaming customers have a new choice to make — to stick with PC-based server vendors like Dell, Compaq and HP, or go with a dedicated streaming appliance from the likes of StarBak, Digital Fountain or Vingage?

One of the key selling points of dedicated streaming appliances is ease of use. "Our final goal is to make it very easy to use streaming appliance servers and make it easy to get everyone into streaming," said Ben Pinkerton, director of product management at StarBak. StarBak makes the Torrent line of streaming media appliances, which supports Windows Media, QuickTime and MPEG-1 and –2 formats.

"You don’t have to learn arcane user interfaces or mess around with settings," said Pinkerton. "You just get an IP address, load content and get streaming at a pretty low cost."

Nikesh Kalra, director of business development at Digital Fountain, said the main difference between streaming appliances and PC-based systems is in the transport, or delivery, of streaming and downloadable media. Kalra said that hardware improvements — like faster processors and better storage — can solve certain problems, but that they do not solve some of the main problems of streaming, like scalability.

"The ultimate test was the Enron/Blockbuster deal that went bust," he said. "It was successful in bringing video to the desktop, but the biggest problem was scalability. They just threw lots of hardware at it. It takes more than general purpose hardware to solve mission critical delivery [of media]." Kalra said that Digital Fountain can even deliver on-demand streams via multicast.

Support for multiple media types is another advantage of the appliances. A company looking to stream in a variety of formats might do well to pick a StarBak or Vingage server, rather than a Compaq server that can only handle RealMedia content. "Most of our customers like the fact that we can deliver multiple formats," said Pinkerton. "You can stream QuickTime and Windows Media all from a single unit, done through a unified interface," he said. "With a typical PC server, you only get one format and have to learn a different UI for each and maintain them separately."

Kalra said using different hardware for different media types ends up being a "hardware nightmare" for customers. Digital Fountain's streaming server handles RealNetworks, Windows Media and QuickTime formats from one box.

Dan Schiappa, president and chief executive officer of Vingage, said that its servers surpass SGI's streaming throughput numbers. "Vingage provides a wide range of completely scalable video server solutions that have something no one else has — the ability to manage and deliver from a single file." Vingage's server needs only one high-quality video source file to deliver to a wide variety of streaming formats, which can mean lower transcoding and storage costs.

The choice for servers has grown complicated since the early days of streaming, when just one box might have been enough. Now, dedicated servers and rack-mounted boxes are the norm, and getting a handle on all the intricacies of the new servers is almost a full time job. But as streaming continues to grow, more and more companies will be making their hardware choices. "By and large, streaming in the enterprise hasn't taken off in Fortune 500 America," said Kalra, "[but] we'll be here when it does."