Whenever my friends asked me about the details of the project that I am working for at Sun Microsystems, I was not able to disclose more information to them. But I am free to do it finally as the product that I am working on is announced to the public.

Sun has announced the availability of Sun Streaming System. The image you see on the right is a system that could support 160,000 streams at 2 Mbps and a storage of 72 TB.

The massive network throughput of the system is made possible by SunFire x4950 Streaming Switch. It has 8 lines cards, each having four 10 Gbps ports. The switch has a memory up to 2 TB. Thus a fully populated switch has 2 TB of memory and 320 Gbps ingress and 320 Gbps egress throughput.

The wonderful storage capability of the system is powered by SunFire x4500 a.k.a. Thumper. It has 48 disk drives in a 4 RU box. With 750 GB SATA drives, a Thumper can offer 36 TB of raw storage. This is one of the highest density disk storage available in the market today.

On a fully populated configuration the system can pump out video at 320 Gbs and have a storage capacity of 1152 TB fed in at 320 Gbps. The system is extremely scalable. One can modify the configuration of the system to include components as they wish to support a given load scenario. For instance if the operator wants to provide more stored video, add more Thumper to the system. If the operator wants to support more trick plays per second, add additional session controllers and so on. I am sure that this is going to create a revolution in the IPTV segment.

I really feel proud to be a part of the team behind Sun Streaming System.