AUTOMOTIVE

At Super Bowl XXXIX, twelve SI photographers will shoot an astounding 16,000 digital photos during the 3.5 hour Super Bowl game. To capture the historic battle between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles, SI photographers will take more than two pictures for each second of regulation game play. To efficiently store, annotate, sort and publish the best images, SI has assembled the most advanced digital photo management and clustered storage systems to be used for a live sporting event. "The switch to digital photography and a digital workflow will save SI nearly $2 million this year while at the same time enabling us to publish the best pictures ever," said Phil Jache, deputy directory of technology for Sports Illustrated. "We rely on Isilon IQ for the most important events because 'it just works', liberates us from concentrating on our storage infrastructure, and allows us to publish photos faster than ever before." At the heart of its 100 percent digital work flow is the SI mobile editing trailer where compact flash cards, full of recently captured images, are delivered by runners and loaded onto a high performance 6.75 terabyte Isilon IQ storage cluster. Photo editors, using a bank of networked laptop computers running Microsoft Windows, rapidly annotate, review, sort and prepare digital photos stored on Isilon IQ for publication to multiple SI online and print media properties. To select the best photos from the Super Bowl showdown for its millions of print and online readers, SI editors require a fast, reliable digital storage infrastructure that enables them to review and sort more than two pictures for each second of game play -- from kickoff to the coronation of this year's Super Bowl victor. "Major organizations like Sports Illustrated are turning to Isilon IQ because it is solving real problems out in the field," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Isilon IQ has a real and significant impact on the success and profitability of their customers' businesses, of which Sports Illustrated is one example. Isilon also brings to the table tons of experience and a proven track record of success supporting these environments. Isilon is one of the clear leaders in network clustered storage for digital content and its customer wins and ongoing product enhancements are the proof." "We are thrilled Isilon IQ is a core part of SI's Super Bowl coverage," said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development for Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ enables customers like Sports Illustrated to store all of their content in one shared pool, manage it with unprecedented ease and reliability, and substantially improve the economics for delivering the highest quality content to their readers."