HP and Intel opened two IPTV test centers to help carriers and broadband providers take advantage of the opportunities of the emerging technology. At the two facilities, located in Grenoble, France, and Richardson, Texas, the companies have created state-of-the-art working environments where carriers and broadband providers can develop and model the infrastructure they need to deliver an IPTV service. The facilities allow for performance and scalability evaluation, characterization, sizing, full proof-of-concept testing, and integration of IPTV solutions into the network and the operational and business support systems.
The centers feature HP ProLiant servers and server blades with the recently announced Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor series, as well as HP Integrity servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors. The centers also provide access to HP professional services, HP service management solutions for IPTV, and HP content management and distribution expertise. The centers also will include Intel technologies such as virtualization, active management and input/output acceleration.
HP and Intel have defined six areas where they will help carriers and broadband providers enhance their IPTV offerings:
- Infrastructure - Deploy an end-to-end IPTV environment, including head-end for content import and ingest, video servers, IPTV middleware, content protection, and digital home environment. Define and characterize baseline architecture for IPTV ecosystems for centralized and distributed environments, including guidelines for hardware configurations and integration points.
- Video server reference architecture - Optimize video streaming capability with minimal server resources, based on network capacity and topology, streaming capacity and subscriber density, and storage of movie catalog and consumption patterns.
- IT service management - Define standard management processes for handling incidents, problems, changes and configurations, and overall service levels.
- Service assurance - Define requirements for comprehensive quality of service and management of distributed IPTV applications. Document guidelines for implementation of HP service assurance tools in IPTV environment.
- Content distribution - Define, test and document managed content delivery network overlay to the underlying, physical telecom network.
- Service provisioning - Prepare content for distribution by IPTV service. Define head-end workflow for content import, channel line-up, and catalog management.
