Kasenna Scales VOD with 12-Node Linux Server Cluster

Kasenna is using mainstream, web-farm style clustering technologies to scale its VOD server to power a half-million subscriber deployment from a single video head office (VHO) using MPEG-4 (AVC) streams encoded at 2.3 Mbps.





Kasenna has tested a cluster that used 12 dual processor servers with 64-bit Intel Xeon 3.5 GHZ processors. The servers were powered by Kasenna MediaBase version 8.1 software that incorporates hybrid RAM/Disk streaming. The cluster achieved 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 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 for intra-server interconnects, etc.


Kasenna's "Stream Clustering" technology incorporates a number of different algorithms for pre-caching, hot-spot measurements, load averaging and request arrival predictions. This provided the load balancing among the cluster.


"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.
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