Date: 11/04/2012

Hardware engine to stream movies from SSD to tablet and phones

Toshiba has developed hardware engine called NPEngine for streaming servers that directly delivers video content from SSD (solid state disk drive) to IP networks, without accessing the server's CPU or memory resources. The video content means all the digital movies and any other such digital video.

NPEngine is rated to deliver up to 64,000 high quality video streams at a rate of 40Gigabit per sec, far surpassing the performance of a typical server, and reducing power consumption, the number of servers and the space required.

Toshiba to display a server integrating the NPEngine at the NAB show in Las Vegas, from April 16 to 19. Server products running NPEngine will be available this year.

Using this tech digitized video can be delivered over IP networks to PCs, tablet PCs, smartphones and Smart TVs.

This saves media servers' hugh processing effort in retrieving and delivering large quantities of stored data. The number of video streams a server can handled can be increased by using this Toshiba's tech without adding server blades. Toshiba says this direct delivery also boosts the number of high quality video streams that can be delivered at once to 64,000 at 40Gb per sec. By using NPEngine the performance of a 2RU server can be tripled without adding any space and power consumption.

NPEngine is also said to compliant with the newest HTTP adaptive bit rate streaming without any modification of existing HTTP streaming applications.