NETWORKS

LOS ANGELES, CA -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announced that the company's Silicon Storage Appliance is playing a central role in the new 24-hour digital newsroom for Time Warner's NY1 News all-news channel. The Silicon Storage Appliance serves as the enabling storage network infrastructure of Pinnacle Systems' VORTEX News installation at NY1, a complete newsroom solution that integrates all aspects of news editing, playback and archiving of video into a single, seamless environment. The recently-launched production facility provides a model for future Time Warner Cable 24-hour news networks slated for launch throughout the US. "The Vortex system, and the underlying Silicon Storage Appliance technology, brings a twenty-first century broadcast news infrastructure that allows NY1 News to accomplish more, in less time, and is more cost-effective to run than a traditional newsroom," Harlan Neugeboren, senior director, Technology & Engineering, Time Warner Cable local news group, said. "DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliance transforms a traditional storage area network into a non-linear storage network environment, allowing productivity and workflow advantages that had not previously been available in a SAN." Using a Silicon Storage Appliance-based infrastructure allows IT professionals to overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, bringing application acceleration, cost-effective scalability and simplicity with high QoS in a plug and play appliance. The Silicon Storage Appliance with 9 TB of storage, embedded at the core of Vortex, is tightly integrated with the facilities Omnibus Newsroom Automation System which provides the overall control and asset management functionality. By using the Silicon Storage Appliance as the intelligent, centralized backbone of the production environment allows Pinnacle, and NY1 News, to combine the editing of news clips and production of on-air text, graphics and effects into one non-linear process, increasing productivity. "NY1 represents the future of broadcast news operations and we are excited to be playing a key role in this effort," Bob Wilson, president, Broadcast Solutions Division at Pinnacle Systems, said. "The DataDirect solution along with Pinnacle's Vortex News solution provides NY1 with a complete digital newsroom." "Silicon Storage Appliances enable increased efficiency, lower operating costs and the highest levels of Quality of Service (QoS) needed for next generation broadcast environments, providing a compelling, competitive advantage for digital facilities worldwide," Mark McLane, vice president, worldwide sales, DataDirect Networks said. "The storage network implementation at NY1 brings a new foundational tool for real-time news production and delivery, and we are honored to play a key role in this effort." DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows creative professionals to accelerate their applications, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. The acceleration of data to applications and users -- simply and easily -- allows DataDirect Networks' customers to consolidate their storage; the Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows management of up to 100 Terabytes by a single system administrator, providing 10x lower Total Cost of Ownership. Silicon Storage Appliances bring parallelism and superior virtualization benefits to content creators and provides unmatched advantages to the production environment. For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video streams, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology sets new standards in application acceleration and plug and play simplicity. With each appliance's ability to supply over 6000 hours of 50Mbit/sec MPEG2@ML content to 90 concurrent streams, the Silicon Storage Appliance brings industry leading performance and scalability benefits to broadcasting and digital production environments. Directly supporting up to 512 workstations and 180 Terabytes of storage, DataDirect's technology can simultaneously support a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations. DataDirect's "format independence" guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly-compressed all the way to HD and beyond. For further information visit www.datadirectnet.com