ACADEMIA

Dot Hill Systems has announced the addition of Starz Entertainment to its growing list of customers in the video post-production space.

Starz Entertainment is a premium movie and original programming entertainment service provider operating in the United States. The company offers 17 premium channels including the flagship STARZ and ENCORE brands with approximately 19 million and 32.9 million subscribers respectively.

In its role as a digital entertainment powerhouse, Starz Entertainment has experienced tremendous growth in the number of shows, video clips, and other forms of multimedia produced in its studios. The movement to HD content also has expanded the company’s storage needs, while driving the desire for more flexible and cost-effective video post-production solutions with consolidated storage. 

In order to improve post-production development time through data storage consolidation and access, Starz Entertainment turned to a powerful and integrated storage solution from Dot Hill Systems with integration support from GW Hannaway & Associates (GWH&A), a leading solution provider and partner for the imaging and multi-media marketplace.

With the new system from Dot Hill in place, Starz Entertainment now boasts a robust storage system with the necessary throughput and performance to handle HD video streaming and processing for multiple editing suites. In addition, the new system is scalable and designed to easily address future data growth.

Click here to see a clip of exciting STARZ content, produced by Starz’ Entertainment creative team and its post-production group using Dot Hill technology.

The solution combines Dot Hill's reliable, high performance AssuredSAN shared storage solution with ATTO Celerity Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), and Apple Final Cut Pro editing software with connection services to Starz’ Digidesign ProTools audio studios.

With two 3730 AssuredSAN’s and 75 terabytes of fast SAS-drive capacity, the ultra-responsive 8Gb/second Fibre Channel storage network supports demanding multi-user workgroup environments, enabling multiple editors to access the same storage at the same time. Thanks to the Dot Hill AssuredSAN’s 6Gb internal architecture, which produces faster write performance saving even more time on playbacks and streaming, the Dot Hill solution has production humming.

The successful migration to the Dot Hill system enabled the Starz’ Post-Production Group to support significantly more projects. “We look for many things in a new storage solution — higher performance, simple integration, and cost savings,” said Michael Held, Senior Manager, Post-Production, Starz Entertainment. “We greatly benefitted from 8Gb Fibre Channel connection services offered by Dot Hill Systems. The system is transparent to editors and producers, translating into a very short learning curve for the user community.”

“Offering a winning combination of fast, reliable storage which integrates easily into existing video post-production environments to support improved collaboration, Dot Hill’s powerful video post-production solution continues to gain traction with leading names in the entertainment industry such as Starz Entertainment,” said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. “With full support for Windows, OSX and Linux environments, Dot Hill AssuredSAN solutions are ideal to support workflows using Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, Autodesk Smoke or any application demanding extreme video streaming performance and proven reliability.”