Xyratex Demos Intercontinental HD Video Streaming

Xyratex Ltd has demonstrated 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.

The demonstration at ISC’12 displayed several hundred HD videos that
were streamed 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 performance ClusterStor HPC 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-IB 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 comprised a number of
Linux-based video playback nodes, which drive an array of 16 video screens,
that remotely attach to a ClusterStor 3000 system over a 40Gbps QDR IB
connection.

Additional equipment from Bay Microsystems, in the form of a pair
of specially configured IBEx M40 Global IB Extension Switches, provides a ‘virtual’
11,000km link by adding an equivalent time delay to all IB traffic between the
video file-server and video-playback systems. Xyratex 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.

"We welcomed the
opportunity to showcase our expertise in high-performance data storage
solutions in response to the request by Orange Silicon Valley," said
Ahmed Shihab, Xyratex SVP Business Line Management. "Xyratex values this opportunity to partner with Orange Silicon Valley
on such an exciting demonstration and to be able to showcase it at ISC’12. We
have made a significant investment in the development of our Lustre based
ClusterStor family of HPC data storage solutions and are always looking for
challenging applications that highlight the scalable, high performance
architecture we developed."