With broadband technologies such as digital cable and DSL, it is now possible to access vast libraries of movies, news shows, educational programs, and countless other types of video over a digital network. Throughput measures how much media can be streamed by a given server - more throughput means lower capital and operating costs. The n4 delivers industry-leading throughput because it was designed from the ground up as a streaming media appliance. Scalability measures how many streaming servers can share access to the same copy of each media file or piece of content.
Media files tend to be very large, so they require a lot of storage space on the server.
If each streaming media server needs its own copy of every file, the cost, physical size and operational complexity of the server farm quickly becomes overwhelming. Most of the streaming servers on the market today don't even attempt to address the problem, they have used networking technologies that were designed for other types of problems. These approaches quickly run out of capacity and usually contain many potential failure points. The hypercube offers the only approach that allows systems to scale from a single server to hundreds of servers while only requiring a single copy of each file. That copy is available to all servers in the farm so the customer does not need to keep replicating the content library as the system capacity grows.