How can Sanbolic software help me?

Streaming media and iptv

Streaming servers can share a common content library, delivering content to large audiences rapidly and flexibly.

Streaming media installations are increasingly common as elements of websites, as corporate communication tools, and as educational tools both on-campus and for distant learning initiatives. Streaming audio and video on demand to many types of consumer devices has become increasingly common, and prospectively IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) will become an important competitor to traditional broadcast and cable distribution.

A common challenge is to make very large content libraries available without replicating content for each streaming server. Sanbolic’s software allow multiple servers to have shared read-write access to large content libraries residing on SAN storage.

As the content library grows, Sanbolic’s LaScala enables additional storage arrays to be added to the shared content library without taking the system offline. The additional capacity is immediately available to all servers. As the use of streamed content grows, Sanbolic’s Melio FS allows additional streaming servers to be added to the infrastructure dynamically to support additional users.

Sanbolic’s products have been designed expressly for storage environments using SAN storage and enable customer to easily manage networked storage as a single pool of data that can be accessed by multiple servers concurrently, greatly reducing complexity and giving users much more flexibility in how they can access their data. The design point for these products was a large telecom network operation center application running multiple operating systems. The product architecture has been designed to support multiple operating systems and storage hardware platforms in a very large environment demanding very high reliability. Even with their extensive capabilities, our products are exceptionally easy to install and use.

Example

Using standard Microsoft Media Services components, Miami Dade College integrated a campus wide video streaming system. The system currently consists of three digitzing servers and twelve streaming servers all running Sanbolic’s shared volume manager LaScala and shared file system Melio FS. The servers are all connected to a shared storage array through a fibre channel switch. The two digitizing stations write content from multiple video sources onto a shared storage array storage array, where it is immediately available to all six streaming servers. The content can then be accessed over the campus Ethernet network by any PC running Microsoft Media Player. Students can access content from their dorm room, and professors can access high resolution content for classroom purposes.