Microsoft cuts Mediaroom server demands

Microsoft today announced new server virtualization capabilities for its Mediaroom IPTV platform, addressing arguably the most criticized aspect of the Microsoft approach the IPTV: The number of servers required. This new version of Mediaroom can support up to 30,000 subscribers on less than 10 servers, and can cut by a factor of six the number of servers required in general. In fact, Microsoft is now claiming to have the smallest server footprint required for a complete IPTV solution.

“Server quantity has been a big issue for us, rightly or wrongly,” said Ben Huang, director of product management for Microsoft Mediaroom. “We think we have always had a good overall cost of ownership story, but the server issue has popped up. This is the first time virtualization has ever been applied to IPTV in a carrier grade environment, and as a consequence this is the lowest bar in terms of the number servers required to start offering IPTV.”
This latest move by Microsoft comes as Independent telco interest in IPTV seems to be increasing once more.

Server virtualization enables applications to share a pooled resource of server capacity rather than requiring dedicated servers for individual applications. Virtualization has been used in other applications, particularly in data centers, for some time now. Microsoft is using Hyper V virtualization technology from Windows Server 2008.

“This goes a long way to helping new smaller operators and even existing Mediaroom customers who are larger operators scale to support more subscribers,” said Jeff Heynen, analyst with Infonetics Research. “[Server capacity] was going to be a problem anyway, and it’s not just about serving subscribers. Because of the rise of Video on Demand and Network DVR and startover services, you were talking about adding more servers to support those features anyways.”

“It’s a good move,” agreed Michelle Abraham, analyst with InStat. “It will reduce the number of servers, and also the space required for servers and the labor to do all the monitoring. It gets them into customers who may have considered a Mediaroom solution out of their reach. And it also helps companies like Century Tel and Frontier – those companies that have widespread operations that are smaller operations. This helps Microsoft with those types of customers in addition to the smaller IOC that would have one operation.”

Neither Heynen nor Abraham could confirm Microsoft’s claim that Mediaroom now has the smallest server footprint for getting started in IPTV.
Reservation Telephone Cooperative, based in Parshall, N.D., has signed on as a Mediaroom customer and will be using the Mediaroom with virtualization technology.

One of the other advantages of using server virtualization in IPTV is the ability to launch service or even a service test bed on a relatively lightweight platform in terms of server quantities and then grow into a commercial deployment, Huang said. “When we talk about migration, we think a lot about time to market, when you are doing testing or moving from one stage of a trial to commercial deployment,” he said. “When you make it less complex in terms of the number of servers required, it helps our customers get to market quicker.”

Microsoft isn’t sacrificing any features to add server virtualization, Huang said.

“No one ever knocks Mediaroom for our breadth of feature set and our user experience,” Huang said. “We typically stand at the front of the pack in the consumer-facing aspect and we didn’t want to sacrifice that once we moved to virtualization.”

Both Heynen and Abraham said Microsoft is now in a better position to capture independent telcos who are looking to get into IPTV, and even some early IPTV pioneers who were unhappy with their original middleware vendors.

“It will depend on the set-top boxes they have deployed, whether Mediaroom can support those boxes, or whether they needed to change out set-tops anyway,” Abraham said.