ACADEMIA

Dot Hill Systems announced that its AssuredSAN storage is being used by post production solutions developer SGO within its turn-key Mistika systems due to storage system flexibility and outstanding price/performance. The SGO Mistika platform is used for many applications including finishing and final rendering of leading 2D and stereoscopic 3D video and film productions.

Headquartered in Madrid, Spain, SGO is an established leading European developer of high-end solutions that allow total freedom to create and manipulate moving images in real-time for multiple formats including SD, HDTV, Film, Stereoscopic 3D, IMAX and multiple screen projection. SGO's customers include Park Road Post, BSkyB, Framestore, The Look, Identity FX, Preditors, Onsight, BTV Post, Videomedia, Annapurna Studios, Molinare Madrid, Infinia, CVisual, Chroma Film & TV Hamburg, El Colorado, Thomson Technicolor Madrid, Real Madrid Television, OPTIX Digital Pictures, Hocus Focus and Soundfirm, among many others.

To ensure that SGO's systems such as Mistika are able to deliver the performance required for the most demanding workloads, the Dot Hill AssuredSAN system was selected. Ease of use and simple capacity expansion are key features of the Dot Hill AssuredSAN system, allowing up to eight expansion chassis per configuration hosting either 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives.

The SGO Mistika platform utilizes the latest 8Gb Fibre Channel RAID technology with high performance SAS drives. This can deliver a total of 288TB using 3TB SATA drives and more as future drive capacities continue to grow.

Geoff Mills, director of Global Sales & Operations at SGO, said, "We choose the best technologies so that we can retain our leading position in the post production market. The film industry is constantly pushing boundaries, we need a storage solution that provides high performance and flexibility so that we can dynamically meet our Mistika end user requirements as their storage needs grow."

The Dot Hill AssuredSAN system enables SGO to freely mix drive types including SAS, SATA and SSD to allow the most effective allocation of storage resources based on workload and data life cycle. SGO regularly deploys the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3722 systems using SAS drives for one shelf of high performance density with up to 24 2.5-inch drives per chassis and by mixing it with multiple shelves of SATA technology, SGO can cater for both high performance real time workflows alongside less demanding VFX, finishing and archival storage needs.

Thanks to Dot Hill, SGO has improved workflow productivity, increased performance and application response times, maximised performance density with small form factor 2.5-inch SAS drives and benefited from easy-to-use web-based storage management with simple license-free storage capacity expansion.

Warren Reid, EMEA marketing director at Dot Hill, said, "The post production video industry places high demands on storage systems and we have had great success with our AssuredSAN networked RAID products in this market. We are honored and very excited to be working with SGO who are raising the bar for high-end finishing systems with their non-proprietary open architecture."