GAMING

Facing an explosion in data growth that can create costly workflow bottlenecks, commercial and government customers the world over are embracing high-speed storage solutions from Silicon Graphics. SGI today spotlighted the escalating demand for its SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700, the industry's first available storage system with the 4Gbit Fibre Channel interface. SGI also announced the availability of new TP9700 features and additional 4-gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity products, which position SGI as the first storage vendor in the industry to offer a complete 4Gb/sec (4-gigabits per second) Fibre Channel infrastructure. The new offering delivers up to twice the speed of traditional Fibre Channel storage products. To keep ahead of data growth rates of 80 to 200 percent annually, customers including Pacific Title and Art Studio, MTU Aero Engines and the U.S. Department of Defense have implemented high-speed 4Gb/sec storage infrastructures. With 4Gb/sec solutions from SGI, they can more rapidly access and manage large, multi-terabyte (TB) stores of data without having to cut them up into small, hard-to-manage pieces to accommodate narrow-bandwidth storage infrastructures. For users in government, research, media and manufacturing, faster data access means greater productivity and shorter time to completion and discovery. "For a growing number of SGI users, a 4 gigabit Fibre Channel storage environment is an absolute necessity," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Think of it this way: if you have bandwidth intensive applications such as video streaming, then 4 gigabit FC could effectively double your performance. A 4 gigabit storage infrastructure, like these solutions implemented by SGI customers, helps avoid bottlenecks that can impact a user's ability to deliver on project deadlines or meet major milestones. The alternative would be to watch their workflow bog down in constant data logjams, and in today's productivity-centric world, that's not an option." By implementing the SGI InfiniteStorage 4Gb Fibre Channel storage solutions users can significantly reduce the amount of infrastructure required to access and manage their storage. This results in lower cost of ownership and far simpler configurations to manage. In November 2004 SGI was the first company to demonstrate a 4Gb/sec storage area network (SAN). In February 2005 the general availability of the TP9700 made SGI the first vendor to ship a 4Gb/sec storage array, and today's announcement of additional products and features makes SGI the first to offer a complete 4Gb/sec infrastructure. New hardware and software features for the TP9700 increase the performance for a wide variety of applications and add enterprise-class management features. Specifically, controllers with larger amounts of cache, scalable partitioning, volume copy, snap copy, synchronous and asynchronous remote mirroring, and the ability to intermix Fibre Channel and Serial ATA drives controlled by the same TP9700. SGI and storage partners Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Engenio Information Technologies, Inc. and LSI Logic Corporation work together to deliver storage infrastructure solutions with performance and availability unsurpassed in any storage environment. Today SGI adds to its connectivity infrastructure new 4Gbit/sec fibre channel switches, including a new 4Gb director class switch and 4Gb host bus adapters. In addition to the 16 and 32-port 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel switches SGI has been shipping for the past several months, the company now adds the Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Director and the Brocade Silkworm 200E Switch and single-port LSI7104XP-LC and dual-port LSI7204XP-LC 4Gb/sec PCI-X HBAs from LSI Logic. Brocade and LSI Logic announced separately today general availability of their respective products. The addition of these switches and adapters means SGI customers can move to 4Gb/sec at their own pace -- one piece at a time or all at once -- secure in the knowledge that their environment is backed by the industry's premier provider for data-intensive environments. Customers report growing need for speed SGI customers have selected the TP9700 array as the backbone of a high-performance 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel infrastructure. Among them: -- To help Department of Defense users with their big data requirements, the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, enhanced its storage power with the installation of a 130TB SGI TP9700 storage array. ASC MSRC will use the new system to aid weapon systems design of innovative materials; advance design concepts, improve and speed modification programs, increase high fidelity simulations and enable more efficient tests and evaluations. -- To provide the bandwidth, management and scalability of a data storage solution for its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) flight simulator, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. in Fort Worth, Texas, has installed a 33TB SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 storage array. Backed by the TP9700's high-performance 4Gb Fibre Channel architecture and 10Gb network connectivity, this complete and cohesive data storage distribution and management system delivers levels of bandwidth that the JSF simulator requires for data-intensive applications such as recording live video feeds from the cockpit's out-the-window and multifunctional display, as well recording audio and data. The JSF simulator allows pilots to fly high fidelity simulated flight and air combat situations, enabling them to evaluate the F-35's system design in a realistic tactical environment and to recommend changes. The F-35 JSF aircraft is a next- generation, supersonic, multi-role stealth fighter that will serve as the cornerstone of future defense capabilities for the United States and the United Kingdom. -- MTU Aero Engines, recognized globally as a strong player in the development, manufacture and repair of commercial and military engines, recently installed the foundation for a 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel storage infrastructure to meet the expected data access demands of its computer-aided engineering (CAE) data environment. MTU installed two, 4Gb/sec-capable SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 Fibre Channel arrays from Engenio Information Technologies, Inc. This addition of 25TB of storage joined an existing SGI storage environment for a total of 55TB of CAE data. MTU turned to SGI five years ago to centralize all CAE data. Because InfiniteStorage solutions can uniquely scale to manage increasing amounts of data, MTU was able to seamlessly upgrade its fileserving capabilities to the current size and performance. The solution consists of three high-availability, SAN-attached fileservers providing network-added storage over three, 10Gb/sec Ethernet Interfaces. -- Pacific Title & Art Studio, to accommodate the need for greater data storage and performance prompted by the increase in 2K film data and the roll-out of 4K digital cinema masters, deployed a 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel storage infrastructure built around two SGI TP9700 arrays. A leading Hollywood film optical house since 1919, Pacific Title generates 2TB of new data each day. The company implemented the high- speed SAN infrastructure to avoid bottlenecks with 4K film scanning -- a process that generates four times the data and requires four times the performance of 2K film -- and to keep its data constantly available in real time for producers and artists. -- Saarlandischer Rundfunk (SR), a public broadcaster in southwestern Germany, awarded SGI the contract for Phase 1 of its transition to a complete, integrated digital workflow for TV programming production and play-out and archiving of TV and radio material. In June, SR ordered the foundation for a digital production and archival environment with a 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel storage infrastructure. Key components include: four SGI Media Server for Broadcast systems; an SGI® InfiniteStorage NAS system with 22TB total storage for online/editing storage consisting of three SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 systems; 27TB of near-line and tape-based storage managed by SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF), upgradeable to 65TB in Phase 2; and SGI networked editing software for efficient video editing workflows to shorten time-to-air.