Sun Microsystems on Monday expanded its line of streaming media products to cover companies in need for hardware and software to deliver from 100 to 160,000 simultaneous streams of online television and Internet-based video.

The hardware introduced at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, includes Sun Streaming Software Release 2, which leverages the Solaris 10 operating system. The software enables service providers to scale from 500 to more than 1.5 million subscribers and from 200 to more than 1 million hours of content.

Hardware deployments, including server, storage and networking, are available from 1U to 14U configurations. Initially, the Sun Streaming System includes the 1U Sun Fire X4150 server powered by quad-core Intel Xeon processors, the 4U Sun Fire X4600 M2 server driven by Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, and the Sun StorageTek 2530 Array.

Later this year, the Sun Streaming Software will also support carrier-grade Netra x64 servers, Netra ATCA x64 blade servers, and options to include flash-based storage from Sun.

"These new server and storage options offer service providers the maximum flexibility to independently scale streaming capacity, content capacity, ingest rates and degree of user interactivity as the needs of the subscribers evolve," the company said in a statement.

Among the general features in the Sun Streaming System is high-speed memory-based streaming, integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and storage growth from 1 TB to 1.5 petabytes. The Sun Streaming Software supports MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC video format and video stream at any bit rate from 1 Mb per second to 20 Mb per second.

Pricing for the systems was not disclosed.