AT&T Taps Sun Gear for U-verse IPTV

Published: July 19, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Sun Microsystems has announced that telecom giant and IPTV wannabe AT&T has selected its gear to help it build out the infrastructure behind its U-verse entrant into the market.

Rather than take the complete Streaming System that Sun announced at the Tribeca Film Festival back in May, which includes "Galaxy" servers and storage arrays based on Opteron processors as well as a special streaming switch aimed at high-bandwidth workloads like media serving and IPTV, AT&T is cobbling together its own solution from pieces of the Streaming System stack. Sun's X4600 servers, which can span up to eight Opteron processors in a single system image, will be the back end server for the U-verse service. AT&T has chosen Sun's "Thumper" X4500 storage servers, which pack 24 SATA drives onto a motherboard with two Opteron processor sockets. AT&T has also bought a bunch of StorageTek storage arrays, too, and has engaged Sun to support and manage the systems behind the U-verse offering.

U-verse has 320 regular TV channels and 26 high-def channels, all pumped over Internet protocols and available, ultimately, on a nationwide network. The servers and storage behind the system will be arranged in a hub architecture, and the U-verse service is available in 23 different markets in eight states in the United States. AT&T plans to roll out U-verse across the rest of the country during the rest of 2007 and throughout 2008. Neither company revealed how much equipment and or how many services were part of the deal, and they did not say if AT&T was deploying its IPTV service on Linux, Solaris, or a mix of the two.

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