ACADEMIA

With high-quality digital video targeted at hundreds of consumer devices, from HD plasma screens to cell phones, Tarari Inc., the award-winning acceleration company, announced today that it is has teamed with IBM to make it easier to create more powerful solutions for the media and entertainment industry. The combination of the Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media and the IBM eServer BladeCenter platform or IBM IntelliStation workstations deliver the speed, compute resources, scalability, and reliability to meet the exploding demand for high-quality digital content creation and distribution. Tarari will demonstrate the benefits of an accelerated BladeCenter system in both the IBM booth (#SU7049) and the Microsoft booth (#SL332) at the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB2005) in Las Vegas, April 18-21, 2005. Tarari will be used to accelerate WM9 encoding from a Digital Rapids Stream solution. "Both the 'Tarari-powered' IBM eServer BladeCenter and the IBM IntelliStation workstations make great platforms upon which our customers can run our Stream solutions," said Brick Eksten, president of Digital Rapids. "Digital Rapids Stream gives them complete control over inputs and outputs from one streamlined workflow, including deck control, GPI triggers, watch folders, batch modes, clip lists, DVD output, email notification, ftp distribution, or template based log files. The Tarari Encoder Accelerator works seamlessly with our Stream software to give our customers the highest quality WM9 files in the shortest time." The Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media leverages Tarari's award-winning acceleration technology to offload and accelerate any Microsoft Windows Media encoding application that is based on the Microsoft Windows Media SDK. The Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media is easily installed as a co-processing blade alongside any BladeCenter HS20 or in an IBM IntelliStation workstation to accelerate existing solutions without requiring producers or artists to change their applications, production processes, or configurations. This extremely powerful solution is ideal for solutions supplied to major movie studios, post production houses, and the IPTV industry. "Tarari acceleration enables the creation of an efficient, scalable digital media ecosystem leveraging the integrated, extremely flexible, and scale-out IBM eServer BladeCenter platform," said Juhi Jotwani, Director of IBM eServer BladeCenter Alliances, Systems & Technology Group. "The complete solution offers unparalleled value to media and entertainment customers who are engaged in pre- and post-production of digital media." "With the explosion in high-quality digital content creation and distribution, producers must ensure they have the infrastructure they need to bring their products to market faster than ever before," said Randy Smerik, CEO of Tarari, Inc. "With Tarari's acceleration technology as part of a BladeCenter ecosystem or installed in an IntelliStation workstation, digital media producers can build out their production facilities with complete confidence that they have deployed the most competitive and cost-effective solution in the industry." At NAB2005, Tarari will be demonstrating various applications installed in an IBM eServer BladeCenter with multiple IBM HS20 Blade Servers and multiple Tarari powered blades all attached to an IBM Total Storage SAN solution. This new "Digital Media in a Box" solution represents one of the highest-performing and lowest power-consuming encoding solutions on the market. A fully equipped IBM eServer BladeCenter chassis with 7 HS20 Blades and 7 Tarari-powered blades can out perform a fourteen 1U server configuration by 2 to 5 fold while only consuming half the power and providing unprecedented reliability. Encoding jobs that previously took days to perform can now be done in hours. Tarari is an active member of the BladeCenter Alliance Program and is also investigating the possibility of using the IBM, Intel Open Specification Program and with its upcoming ASIC-based solutions to create a number of future products for the Digital Media, Network Security and XML markets based on BladeCenter platform. For example, a future product that could take advantage of the available daughter card slot on each BladeCenter HS20 would result in a further doubling of performance in a fully equipped BladeCenter chassis.