New Sgi Origin 300 Servers To Be Used For Telefonica Servicios Audiovisuales European And South American Vod Rollout

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Jan 7, 2002

SGI (NYSE: SGI), a provider of high-performance computing, complex data management and visualization products, solutions and services, recently announced that the company is working with Telefonica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA) in the integration of an interactive video-on-demand (VOD) solution based on the SGI Origin 200 server. The VOD solution, targeted to the hotel and hospital market, implements a software package developed by TSA, running on a separate Windows NT operating system box; interactive TV is made available to the hotel guest by the SGI VOD platform, based on the Thirdspace OVS video pump and scalable SGI Origin family servers. TSA is currently integrating the IRIX OS?based SGI Origin 200 system.

TSA has designed the system to offer at least 30% concurrency in the hotels (35 - 40 streams in a typical-size 120-room hotel). Once the testing period is complete, TSA is positioned to release its interactive VOD application -- running on the brand new, just-announced SGI Origin 300 server -- as an easily customizable solution for the hotel and hospital VOD market. TSA's objective is to be a major presence in most hotel chains in Spain, South America and Europe during the coming years. To this end, TSA is in conversations with several other hotels in order to install the same solution on their premises.

"We see SGI as a key reference in digital video technology," said Juan Mancebo, head of technology, Telefonica Servicios Audiovisuales. "We asked SGI if it could help us design a complete solution, and it did. SGI Origin 200 is a robust pilot solution for our VOD product. We expect to sign an agreement of collaboration with SGI to extend the product to other hotels around the world, using the new SGI Origin 300 server, which we find very attractive because of the cheaper cost per stream that it is able to provide."

"We are very pleased that SGI Origin family servers and the SGI VOD platform have been chosen for this important collaboration with TSA," said Fabio Gallo, director of marketing, SGI EMEA. "The SGI VOD platform is a complete broadcast-quality MPEG-2 video-on-demand solution available on the entire SGI Origin server family. SGI's sales and services teams look forward to what we firmly believe will be TSA's continued commitment to the new SGI Origin 300 server, as they implement video-on-demand throughout hotel chains in Europe and South America."

The SGI Origin 300 server extends the SGI NUMAflex modular computing approach to space-saving, lower cost configurations that can be specifically tailored for high-performance computing, data archival, or media streaming applications. With its unique, modular design, the SGI Origin 300 server is able to pack tremendous performance into compact, rack-mounted systems. The base server module holds two or four MIPS 64-bit processors, up to 4GB of memory and two disk drives in only 3.5 inches of rack space. Optional add-on components add I/O bandwidth, in-rack storage or additional system bandwidth for scalability up to 32 processors in a single, shared-memory system. Two 32-processor SGI Origin 300 systems fit into a single, industry-standard rack. Customers can scale performance and capacity by combining the power of the SGI Origin 300 server with the recently announced SGI Total Performance 900 (TP900) disk array to give users the ability to deploy an enterprise-class solution at an attractive price.