Kasenna announced today it is launching a new video server based on Intel’s 64-bit Xeon processors that allows the company to significantly increase its streaming throughput.

The 3.2 version of MediaBase achieves 3.2 Gb/s of streaming throughput (853 streams at 3.75 Mb/s) from a dual-CPU, three rack-unit disk-based server. In the RAM-based server, the new processing power delivers 5.4 Gb/s in a 1RU unit. Using CableLabs’ specification of 3.75 Mb/s per video stream, the resulting server provides up to 1440 streams per 1RU server or 60,480 streams per 42RU rack.

In the telco environment, the company is anticipating the new processing power to let carriers deploy video-on-demand across a distributed server environment.

“We can utilize the memory in this system to cache the most popular titles,” said Greg Carter, vice president of business development for Kasenna. “The bandwidth of memory is much higher than disk.”

In one scenario, new-release movies would be stored in memory while a larger library of less popular material would be stored on disk. Determining the location of the content can be done automatically based on the number of times it’s ordered and the cost of the storage.

“The system will automatically migrate the most popular content into the highest performance cache,” Carter said. “It’s really a concept of cache propagation.”

In addition to the processing power, Kasenna has developed a software enhancement that allows it to drive gigabit Ethernet router efficiency up to 90%.