ACADEMIA

Sun StorageTek T10000 Provides Petabyte-Scale Archive Growing at 5,000 Video Clips per Week for Top Motion Imagery Services Firm: Sun Microsystems announced today that Thought Equity Motion, Inc. has added Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drives to its existing Sun storage infrastructure to dramatically improve the storage density, performance and scalability of its digital archiving and on-demand content delivery system. As a result, Thought Equity Motion, a leader in motion imagery licensing and management for the entertainment, creative and corporate production industries, is able to deliver content four times faster than it had previously while more than doubling its data storage capacity within its existing data center footprint. Thought Equity Motion is experiencing rapid growth due to the increasing demand for digitized video clips that are accessible over the internet for use in feature films, television programs, advertising and corporate presentations. Customers such as the NCAA, HBO Archives, National Geographic and Sony Pictures are driving this demand and, as such, the company's digital archives are expanding at the rate of 5,000 new film and high-definition video clips each week. In order to maintain its operational efficiently and high level of customer satisfaction standards, Thought Equity Motion needed a high-performance storage solution to keep pace with customer demands while storing more data with fewer drives to reduce data center footprint, power consumption and long-range storage hardware costs. By deploying the StorageTek T10000 tape drives to complement its existing Sun storage infrastructure, Thought Equity Motion has been able to scale its petabyte-level storage environment in cost-effective increments to keep pace with customer requirements for rapid access to large film and video files. "With creative professionals demanding instant, 24/7 access to the finest in production-quality film and high definition content, a reliable, cost-effective storage solution isn't a luxury for Thought Equity Motion, but a necessity and a competitive advantage," said Mark Lemmons, Chief Technology Officer, Thought Equity Motion, Inc. "Sun once again has risen to the challenge with its StorageTek T10000 tape drive. Beyond the outstanding 400 percent throughput improvement and the 250 percent increase in storage density, we have avoided significant chassis replacement costs by leveraging our existing Sun StorageTek tape library and have established a scalable, flexible infrastructure for cost-effective, incremental expansion." Thought Equity Motion evaluated solutions from other tape vendors, but chose Sun because of its longstanding positive relationship with Sun technologies and Sun's proven excellence in engineering tape drives. Thought Equity Motion was able to leverage its existing Sun storage systems by installing one of the new StorageTek T10000 tape drives in its Sun StorageTek L700 tape library, which uses both Sun StorageTek T10000 and T9940B tape drives to store production-ready master video clips. The compatibility of the StorageTek T10000 drive with the StorageTek L700 tape library has allowed Thought Equity Motion to rapidly add new storage capacity. These systems are connected on a storage area network managed from a single console with Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager software, providing Though Equity Motion with an integrated solution to manage data over its entire lifecycle. "The explosion of digital entertainment, especially in the form of video, has created something of a paradox when it comes to storage infrastructure. Customers must expand capacity while maintaining or reducing their footprint," said David Yen, executive vice president, Storage Group, Sun Microsystems. "Thought Equity Motion's deployment demonstrates how capably Sun's StorageTek high performance, highly scalable tape solutions meet that challenge -- not only are we helping them expand their business, but we're also helping them meet and exceed their customers' service-level expectations."