Mobile video is a double-edged sword for operators — customers are willing to pay more each month to watch video on mobile devices, but processing that video is straining data centers to capacity and beyond. 40% of existing data centers will be maxed out by the end of next year, according to the Data Center User Group.
“As people want to continue to grow in mobile video, they are going to run out of space; power is going to become an issue,” said Craig Lee, chief marketing officer of QuickFire Networks, a San Diego startup formed to create a data center solution for carriers struggling to keep up with the demands that video is placing on the core network. QuickFire’s T-Video is a compact server appliance specifically designed for video encoding and transcoding. It is powered by eleven Intel Core i7 CPUs, quad-core chips usually found in personal computers rather than in servers, which are often powered by Intel’s Zeon chipset.
“The Zeon is a fantastic chipset, but it’s really not geared for video,” said Lee. “To address the needs of real-time video, which has got a big payload component and a dynamic optimization component, you really need something that specifically meets those types of processing needs .. What [the Core i7] offers is not just the great CPU performance but good power management, and it has hardware acceleration available .. what Intel has done [has] made huge improvements in video processing.”
Lee said QuickFire’s T-Video can provide transcoding for 72 live 1080p sessions on one 1U chassis. “We believe it’s the densest hardware platform on the market,” he said. The T-Video is currently sampling with its first customer, Vantrix.
The QuickFire partners believe the carrier market for mobile video processing in data centers is worth $200 – $300 million, not yet big enough to merit the attention of the larger players, whom Lee thinks are more focused on the $40 billion cloud computing market. Watch the full RCR interview with QuickFire’s Craig Lee below.
