Cinegroupe Uses Silicon Storage Appliance as the Backbone of 3D Production Facility
DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance Provides Application Acceleration, Easy Management to the 67 Server Render Farm, 55 Creative Workstations
LOS ANGELES - January 28, 2002 - DataDirect Networks, Inc., the leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announced that CineGroupe, a leading entertainment company based in Montreal has installed DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliance to serve as the intelligent backbone of a new 3D production studio. CineGroupe will be using the facility for production of the 3D feature length film Pinocchio 3001, an 80 minute animated feature co-produced by CineGroupe, AnimaKids (France) and Castelao Productions SNA (Spain), along with work on other series that CineGroupe is producing.
The Silicon Storage Appliance was chosen based on its unbeatable application acceleration, scalability, and management capabilities. Serving as the heart of the CineGroupe 3D studio's storage network environment, the Silicon Storage Appliance links a SGI Origin 3200 server, 67 HP NetServer LP 1000R dual processor render servers, 55 creative workstations, 6 Terabytes (TB) of storage, and a Sony PetaSite automated tape library with 17TB of storage through an ATM network to serve the 3D special effects, live action and animation production needs of the group.
"The Silicon Storage Appliance's application acceleration allows us to increase productivity by processing the complex data models associated with 3D rendering exponentially faster, far surpassing speeds that were achievable in the past," Michel Poisson, director of CineGroupe's 3D Studio, said. "Configuration and management are extremely simple and straightforward, and having the Silicon Storage Appliance in our production studio provides us with avenues to quickly and easily adapt to new projects and demands in production without increasing our IT staff."
"DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliance brings us the ability for easy expansion, with the appliance offering massive headroom in all directions," Martin Talbot, technical director, CineGroupe's 3D studio, said. "It rocks! The combination of scalability, performance and easy management brought about by the Silicon Storage Appliance allows creativity with minimal compromise."
"The Silicon Storage Appliance provides the intelligent platform to build out scalable, high performance storage networks especially well suited for digital content creation operations," Yvan Ouellet, co-founder, LOR-TECH International, said. "By using Silicon Storage Appliances as the core of their storage networks, production companies are able to significantly increase their productivity, benefiting company and customers in the short and long term."
LOR-TECH International was responsible for the design and deployment of the 3D production facility technological infrastructure, bringing together the solution that addressed CineGroupe's needs for application acceleration, scalability and easy management.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership, Higher Return on Investment
DataDirect Networks has created highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and lower operating costs.
The Silicon Storage Appliance serves at the core of the storage network, bringing unbeatable and guaranteed bandwidth to the production environment. It brings unique superior virtualization and parallelism to broadcasters, and provides unmatched advantages to the production environment. For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video streams, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks presents a storage networking technology that sets new standards in application acceleration and plug and play simplicity.
With each appliance's ability to supply over 6000 hours of 50Mbit/sec MPEG2@ML content to 90 concurrent streams per appliance, the Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to real-time broadcasting and production environments. DataDirect's "format independence" guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly-compressed all the way to HD and beyond.
Silicon Storage Appliances overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, bringing application acceleration with high QoS. Directly supporting up to 512 workstations and 180 Terabytes of storage, DataDirect's technology can simultaneously support a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations.
DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows creative professionals to accelerate their applications, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. The acceleration of data to applications and users -- simply and easily -- allows DataDirect Networks' customers to consolidate their storage; the Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows management of up to 100 Terabytes by a single system administrator, providing 10x lower Total Cost of Ownership.
Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include the British Broadcasting Company, Star TV, Loudeye, NASA, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories National Century Financial Enterprises, Sandia National Laboratories, and Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS, Seagate, Emulex, and QLogic, among others.
A Silicon Storage Appliance broadcast implementation white paper is available on DataDirect Networks' web site at www.datadirectnet.com/solutions/broadcast.html.
About CineGroupe
CineGroupe is a leading integrated entertainment company dedicated to the development, production, post-production and distribution of hit animation and live action programming for kids, teens and families, as well as interactive products for the Canadian and worldwide markets. CineGroupe's high quality, award-winning productions are seen in 125 countries. Headquartered in Montreal, with an office in Los Angeles, CineGroupe currently has over 400 creative and dedicated employees. CineGroupe is a partner of Lions Gate Entertainment and Fox Family Worldwide. Find CineGroupe online at www.cinegroupe.com.
About LOR-TECH International
LOR-TECH International offers highly integrated system solutions for the production, post-production and distribution of visual media. The leading-edge deployments offered are tailored to the specific requirements of the digital content creation industry. LOR-TECH's partnership with clients and suppliers in the continuing quest for innovative solutions to media production and productivity problems is the keystone to the development of the Company. More information can be found at www.lor-tech.com.
About DataDirect Networks, Inc.
DataDirect Networks is the leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent storage networking appliances. Serving IT professionals in the broadcasting, digital production, government, defense, and oil and gas industries, DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy, simple and trouble-free to accelerate and manage applications, dramatically reducing TCO and increasing ROI. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at (818) 700-7600 or visit www.datadirectnet.com.
Silicon Storage Appliance is a trademark of DataDirect Networks, Inc. ©2002 DataDirect Networks, Inc. All other names are property of their respective owners.