BAYSIDE, CALIFORNIA, February XX, 2011 – StreamGuys, Inc., a streaming media and content delivery provider, is bringing more virtualization to the streaming media world. The company is establishing a transparent virtualized platform that delivers true quality-of-service and an economical path to 100gbps host clusters. “Virtualization and cloud computing have officially entered the lexicon of everyday discussion in the business world,” said Kiriki Delany, president of StreamGuys. “These are two very different concepts often confused as one-and-the-same. Our first goal is to bring the benefits of virtualization to our existing customers as we expand our service offering, with expanded offerings to a true cloud based computing service. We believe that the tangible benefits of virtualization, combined with our renowned service and support, will enable StreamGuys to offer better services in our existing markets such as broadcast, worship, government, e-media and content providers.”
StreamGuys launched its Streaming Virtualization service to provide a next-generation environment for mission-critical content delivery and multimedia streaming. Virtualization separates the hardware layer from the services, establishing tangible benefits including improved redundancy and scalability, enhanced storage and recovery options, increased streaming capacity, advanced monitoring and reporting capabilities, reduced management, and decreased costs through a more efficient rack space footprint and a greener use of operating resources such as power and cooling.
Availability of service is a key feature for streaming media customers such as broadcasters that need 100 percent uptime. According to Delany, StreamGuys is taking advantage of virtualization to support high service availability and fault tolerance.
“We are building clusters of physical nodes on top of VMWare ESXi at the host level,” said Delany. “Abstracting the hardware layer from services allows us to modify architecture and adapt organically with demand. We also offer services with varying levels of redundancy and availability. This means we can more closely design and price solutions based on customer requirements.”
In terms of network capacity, StreamGuys is enabling the path to 100gbps services by standardizing on 10gbps network connectivity all the way to the physical host servers, allowing our customers to very easily scale for large events and bursts of traffic. The company is also expanding its data centers by implementing VMWare’s vSphere Hypervisor architecture at its Dupont Fabros (DFT) Data Center in Chicago as well as in Amsterdam and other data center locations around the world.
The StreamGuys Streaming Virtualization service is also ideal for short-notice events, where StreamGuys can more rapidly provision services than what is possible on physical systems.
Delany added that the company’s plans for cloud computing will grow out of the success of its virtualization efforts. The company is interested in offering cross-compatible services with leading cloud computing platforms today, integrating its virtualization platform into existing cloud-based services. However, the company has clear plans to move forward with its own cloud strategy. One such element, “storage as a service,” will play a significant role in its own cloud computing services.
“Cloud computing offers a consolidated environment for better resource management and an opportunity to abstract the hardware layer from the service layer,” said Delany. “As a content delivery network, virtualization and cloud computing allow us to bring better engineering and enhanced architecture to our current streaming services with a managed virtualization platform for our clients. The main drawback for virtualization and cloud computing today is that people don’t always know what they are buying. We want our customers to realize the benefit of virtualization in an essentially transparent service that includes professional expectations and mission critical quality-of-service and performance.”