RealScale Technologies Announces Successful Test Results of Video Streaming on i-Cluster Blade Servers

Windows Media Server streaming tests show that one i-Cluster chassis can serve over 1000 simultaneous subscribers viewing high-quality video and audio files.

Sophia Antipolis, France - October 26th 2001 - RealScale Technologies Inc. today announced the results of the Windows Media Server Unicast streaming tests carried out on its i-Cluster Blade Server platform.

The results are extremely positive since a single i-Cluster Blade Server chassis, with minimal configuration, can serve over 1000 subscribers viewing entire high quality streams," said Serge Dujardin, President of RealScale Technologies. Compared to heavy high-end servers, the i-Cluster Blade Server platform is a very cost-effective and scalable solution allowing Enterprises and Service Providers to progressively develop high quality and reliable streaming video services."
Our lab tests have shown that a single i-Cluster chassis, including up to 12 Blade Servers, can host up to four separate service levels with dedicated bandwidth, for example 750Kbps, 500Kbps, 250Kbps video flow and streams with less than 100Kbps," said Jean-Christophe Pari, CTO of RealScale Technologies. A full high availability chassis configuration has a total storage capacity of 350Gb, all Blade Servers being equipped with RAID 1 hard disks of 30Gb and a potential bandwidth of 1 Gb."

In our test configuration", added Jean-Christophe, each chassis can serve up to 1000 clients with near DVD quality video streams or 2000 clients with near VHS quality video streams. Remember that one standard 19" cabinet can contain up to 21 i-Cluster racks of 12 Blade Servers, therefore, 252 Blade Servers hosted on a single cabinet can serve over 20,000 clients simultaneously with streams nearly matching DVD quality levels."

All tests were conducted using Microsoft®'s Windows Media Load Simulator tool Version 4.0." said Jean-Christophe Pari. We set up Windows Media Server on the i-Cluster Blade Server with an entry configuration including a 566MHz Intel® Celeron® processor, 128Mb of RAM and two 6Gb IDE hard disks. In order to imitate real-life environments, we calibrated the test environment to match xDSL implementations of typical ADSL providers such as Belgacom, France Telecom or Deutsche Telekom. We voluntarily used a very low-end i-Cluster Blade Server configuration to determine the minimum number of streams and users we can serve. Several PCs were used to simulate the subscribers load and various user characteristics, including the case of subscribers that play entire streams and the case of interactive players that browse and play intensively with the streams. An additional configuration was used to control the visual quality of the stream, running Windows® 98, Windows Media Player 7.1."

We believe that our i-Cluster platform offers the perfect leverage for cost-conscious companies wishing to develop high quality video and audio streaming. The i-Cluster platform has been designed for high availability and distributed deployment allowing for centralized NOC management. It is ideally positioned to be distributed over the network right into the network edge (e.g. ADSL Pops) to provide high quality video streaming reliably, efficiently and cost-effectively," added Serge Dujardin, President of RealScale.

The i-Cluster offering is ready for shipment. Prices for i-Cluster based High Availability Blade Servers start at $990. For more information about price and availability, please contact RealScale at: sales@realscale.com.

About RealScale Technologies

RealScale Technologies, Inc. is a pioneer and leader of Blade Server Technology. Early in 2000, RealScale released the i-Cluster, the first patent pending Intel®-based Blade Server platform. Today RealScale delivers to Enterprises, Service Providers and OEMs the most comprehensive range of Blade Servers in the market. RealScale brings to its clients the most open, flexible and scalable managed Blade Server platform based on an industry proven server architecture (Intel®-based) while enabling unequalled availability, high server density and extremely low power consumption. Founded in 1997 by Serge Dujardin and Jean-Christophe Pari, the companys European headquarters are located in Sophia Antipolis, France.

RealScale Technologies and i-Cluster are trademarks of RealScale Technologies Inc. and its affiliates. Other product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information about RealScale, visit www.realscale.com or contact:
RealScale Technologies, Inc.
Serge Dujardin, President
Tel: +33 4 93 95 68 70
E-Mail: press@realscale.com