ACADEMIA

LOS ANGELES, CA -- DataDirect Networks, the leading provider of high performance storage network appliances, announced that Sobey Digital Technology Co., Ltd. has chosen the company's S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliances to serve as a powerful, cost efficient and easy to manage storage networking infrastructure for two of their broadcasting customers. DataDirect's S2A 3000 overcomes the many limitations of first generation storage networks, bringing application acceleration with high QoS to broadcasters and professionals in a scalable, plug and play appliance. The S2A 3000 allows broadcasters to quickly deploy a complete high performance SAN ranging in capacity from 500 GB to 14 Terabytes in a physically small yet powerfully efficient package. Based on DataDirect's proven Silicon Storage Appliance technology in use at broadcast facilities around the world, the 1U high S2A 3000 can simultaneously support a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations, supplying over 400 hours of 50Mbit/sec MPEG2@ML content to 80 concurrent streams to broadcasting and production environments. With "format independence" that guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly-compressed all the way to HD and beyond, the S2A 3000 appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 800 megabytes per second to workgroups typically consisting of one to twenty-four Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, Macintosh and SGI compute nodes. "DataDirect's S2A 3000 provides us with a way to deliver highly scalable and easy to manage storage network solutions at a price that smaller broadcast facilities can easily afford," Mr. Chen Feng, president, Sobey Digital Technology Co., Ltd., said. "As one of the important solution providers for China's broadcasting industry, our customers are looking to gain an advantage on their competition, and by using the S2A 3000 we can bring the competitive benefits of SANs to more broadcasting and multimedia professionals throughout the country." Sobey is one of the largest professional multimedia equipment manufacturers in China, having installed broadcasting solutions in over 130 television stations in the country. "By choosing DataDirect's S2A 3000 as the foundation of their storage network, broadcasters and creative professionals can easily achieve simplicity and affordability along with high stream count, rock solid audio and video, with excellent storage and host scalability," Brad Winett, vice president, business development, DataDirect Networks, said. "As an influential company in their country's broadcasting and multimedia industry, Sobey's use of the S2A 3000 can open the door for more of China's 3,200 broadcast stations -- regardless of size -- to reap the productivity and workflow benefits of storage networking at an affordable price, providing broadcasting professionals a compelling alternative to first generation SAN technology."