Blackwave Announces R6 Video Storage and Delivery Appliance

Video storage hardware vendor Blackwave announced its first production system, the Blackwave R6, an appliance that runs the company's own proprietary software for video storage and delivery. The software is key, as it allows real-time scheduling to accommodate rapid changes in demand for content. CDNetworks is the first content delivery network to announce publicly that it's using the R6.

"Whether you have thousands or millions of titles, what's hot or cold changes from day to day or hour to hour," says CTO Mike Kilian, who was CTO for EMC and its Centera archiving product before joining Blackwave in 2008. "Our intelligence watches requests for video and in real time changes the video to match the requests.

"If you think you'll have 1,000 simultaneous viewers and provision for that, but only get 100 viewers, then those other 900 views you've provisioned aren't making you money," Kilian says. "They're paying rent."

Blackwave claims the R6—which Kilian says is built from "off-the-shelf" hardware, though he won't say exactly which—can achieve a 10X improvement over traditional read rates. One Blackwave R6 box can store up to 40,000 1Mbps videos in a 1RU space, he adds.

The R6 supports Windows Media, Flash, and HTTP delivery.