NPEngine: First hardware engine that directly distributes streams of video content from SSDs to IP networks

Without having to access the server's CPU or memory resources, Toshiba develops NPEngine, capable of distributing streams of video content from SSDs to IP networks.

Toshiba announced at NAB the development of NPEngine, the world's first hardware engine for streaming servers that directly distributes video content from SSDs to IP networks without having to access the server's CPU or memory resources. The NPEngine can simultaneously distribute up to 64,000 high-quality video streams at a rate of 40 Gigabits per second, far exceeding the performance of a typical server and reducing power consumption, the number of servers and the space needed.

At its stand in Las Vegas, Toshiba has presented a server that integrates NPEngine. Additionally, server products running NPEngine are also available this year.

In today's world of networks, more and more videos are distributed over IP networks to computers, tablets, smartphones and Smart TVs. As this volume increases daily, the need for powerful video streaming equipment on the server side becomes increasingly evident.

For streaming to be successful, servers need to be able to retrieve and distribute large amounts of stored data. Today's servers manage this volume with software, using the server's built-in CPU and SDRAM. This limits the number of video streams that can be distributed simultaneously to approximately 20,000 users on a typical 2RU server. With these limitations, the solution to manage hundreds of thousands of streams at a time has been to increase the number of servers. This approach requires many servers, a lot of space, and high power consumption.

Toshiba's NPEngine provides an alternative that eliminates loads on server CPU and memory resources by distributing video content stored on SSDs directly to IP networks. This direct distribution also increases the number of high-quality video streams that can be distributed immediately to 64,000 users at 40 GB per second. This not only triples the performance of a 2RU server, but also reduces space requirement by 70% and power consumption by 77% for server farms that simultaneously support distribution of 1,000,000 video streams.

The NPEngine also supports the latest HTTP adaptive bitrate streaming without having to modify existing HTTP streaming applications.