Xyratex Demonstrates Intercontinental HD Video Streaming At ISC'12 In Conjunction With Orange Silicon Valley

HAVANT, United Kingdom, June 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Xyratex Ltd (Nasdaq: XRTX) a leading provider of data storage technology, today announced that it will be demonstrating a long-distance HD video streaming solution, which it developed with Orange Silicon Valley in response to specifications defined by Orange Silicon Valley, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'12) in Hamburg, Germany. Representatives from Xyratex and Orange Silicon Valley will be on-hand to demonstrate the system on the Xyratex booth at ISC'12 (Booth #660).

The demonstration at ISC'12 displays several hundred HD videos that are being streamed seamlessly in real-time from file storage that is effectively 11,000km (7,000miles) away across a fully-utilized 40Gbps "network backbone" optical link. Normally the delay introduced by such distances would cause the video playback to stutter excessively or even fail completely. The team from Orange Silicon Valley specified this configuration as they wanted to showcase to their customers how Orange's core backbone network assets can be efficiently utilized. Xyratex responded with a design that leverages its high performance ClusterStor High Performance Computing (HPC) data storage solution.

Christian Eychene, VP IT Infrastructure Technologies & Engineering at Orange, commented, "We have established that the key challenges would be provisioning a video storage file-system capable of streaming video at 40Gbps and, most significantly, configuring the system to accommodate the large latencies incurred across the long-distance link. We believed that the RDMA-over-Infiniband transfer mode supported by the Lustre® file-system would help to solve this. Together with our Silicon Valley team and Xyratex, we built this end to end functional prototype which is being demonstrated at ISC'12 today. This is one of the first, if not the first time, that this many HD videos have been streamed over intercontinental distances from remote storage via RDMA saturating a 40Gbps link, illustrating how global reach can be achieved without any compromise in efficiency of transport."

The demonstration system shown at ISC'12 comprises a number of Linux-based video playback nodes, which drive an array of 16 video screens, that remotely attach to a Xyratex ClusterStor 3000 system over a 40Gbps QDR Infiniband connection. Additional equipment from Bay Microsystems, in the form of a pair of specially configured IBEx M40 Global Infiniband Extension Switches, provides a "virtual" 11,000km link by adding an equivalent time delay to all Infiniband traffic between the video file-server and video-playback systems. Xyratex optimally configured the ClusterStor 3000 system and the Lustre client software, which runs on the Linux-based playback nodes, to support the demanding requirements for this long-distance, high-bandwidth demonstration.

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