Monday, April 13, 2009

Nokeena Optimizes CDN Video Servers for Scalability and QoE

Nokeena Networks, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, unveiled its "Media Flow Director" software appliance for enabling massive stream scalability and television-like quality of experience (QoE) via standard Internet video servers.



Nokeena's Media Flow Director supports up to 40,000 streams and 10Gbps per rack unit while supporting online media's unique characteristics in the areas of multiple encodings, bit-rates, file sizes, viewing platforms, and delivery protocols. The Media Flow Director also ensures that the media content is delivered at a consistent rate in the presence of changes in network conditions and sudden shifts in viewer demand.


Nokeena Media Delivery System leverages several innovations, including a media file size that optimizes how content is stored and later retrieved from a disk. The system stores video content on the disk in a manner that ensures that fragmentation does not occur over time, thereby providing predictable throughput over time. Furthermore it treats each drive as an independent cache. A multi-tier caching system is employed and detailed analytics then automatically migrate content within the tiers based on the dynamics of the workload. The caching system is agnostic to the delivery protocol. This allows multiple delivery protocols to share the cache content.


Nokeena estimates that its innovations will yield a 10 to 1 reduction in number of servers needed to deliver same amount of media. The system works with generic x86 servers (including the latest Nehalem processors) along with various storage devices (SATA/SAS/SSD/NFS). Nokeena's first targets include content delivery networks and service providers.



http://www.nokeena.com

  • Nokeena was co-founded by Rajan Raghavan (previously a co-founder at Xambala, RealChip Communications and Virtual Chips), Prabakar Sundarrajan (previously Citrix Systems, NetScaler and Exodus Communications), Jaspal Kohli (previously principal architect at Yahoo, and CTO at Mirapoint), and Kumar Narayanan (previously a Director of Engineering in the Storage Technology Group at Cisco Systems).