VIDEO CAPACITY PLANNING
The servers you decommissioned aren’t dead, just miscast
Most servers were retired for one reason: their CPUs couldn’t keep up with modern software. Advanced codecs like AV1 and HEVC are extremely taxing on CPUs.
There is a solution. When you put a VPU in the box, the CPU is no longer the bottleneck because it stops performing encoding and is only needed to handle minimal system-level activities.
NETINT VPUs handle decoding, encoding, scaling, and even AI inference functions on a single card that draws under 20 watts. The old CPU just feeds it. Suddenly, the thing that made the server obsolete, a slow processor, no longer matters, because you’ve moved the hard work onto purpose-built silicon.
The density is a further advantage. One VPU can encode up to 32 1080p30 streams while decoding 48 streams. Fill a 1RU server with 10 VPUs, and that recommissioned server now encodes 320 streams and decodes 480. This translates to more than 120 encoding ladders, including H.264, HEVC, and AV1, all from hardware that was written off!
Recommission them, don’t replace them
Even if you could buy new servers tomorrow, putting video transcoding on them might be the wrong call.
Encoding doesn’t need a fast, expensive, hard-to-source CPU when the VPU does the work. So the smart split is simple: recommission your old servers with VPUs and encode video there, meanwhile, keep your new servers for the workloads that actually need them—AI, or whatever else is fighting for that compute.
“You’re not just adding video capacity. You are aligning your compute infrastructure to the highest-value work, without new capital investment.”
That’s the move almost no one is making right now, mostly because “reuse old servers” sounds like a downgrade. It isn’t. In this market, recommissioning what you already own is the highest-leverage thing you can do.
Before the next server purchase order goes out, walk past that rack one more time. There’s a real chance your next block of video encoding capacity is ready; it’s just waiting to be recommissioned.
