STORAGE

To enable motion picture and television episodic customers to explore more creative possibilities and make artistic decisions immediately, Laser Pacific Media Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Company, invested in expertise and a technology infrastructure from Silicon Graphics to create the most flexible, high-performance SAN in Hollywood. SGI Professional Services is now installing Autodesk Stone Shared storage, which incorporates SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 storage and SGI CXFS shared filesystem. This integration will result in easier handling of multiple 2K resolution streams for digital intermediates ( DI ) to meet the greater requirements of Laser Pacific's customers. One of the key differentiations of the SGI shared filesystem is a CXFS feature called Guaranteed Rate I/O v2 ( GRIOv2 ). This enables several high-bandwidth creative applications to run real-time 24 fps 2K resolution ( 300MB/s ) without over subscribing the storage. "The combined strengths and contribution of Autodesk and SGI, in our minds, have created a leap forward in the creative tools and workflow available to our customers," said Leon Silverman, president of Laser Pacific and director of strategic business development for Kodak's Entertainment Imaging Services. "Autodesk and SGI have a long history in working closely together to raise the bar on the quality and performance of the solutions we provide to our mutual customers," said Chris Golson, senior director, Media Industries, SGI. "We have always relied on the visionaries like Laser Pacific to guide our development, and make our products and services provide more benefit to the Hollywood creative community." The Autodesk Stone Shared solution consists of 19TB Fibre Channel storage and 24TB Serial ATA ( SATA ) storage. SGI Professional Services is integrating the SAN into the entire digital intermediate workflow, which begins with the Thomson Spirit 4K datacine, and includes 10 real-time 2K clients running a mix of SGI® IRIX® OS and Windows® OS as SGI CXFS nodes. Because of SGI's scalable system architecture, as Laser Pacific's business grows and 4K digital intermediate becomes more in demand, storage capacity can easily grow to accommodate the increased data storage needs. SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 systems for video production and digital film facilities are based on DataDirect Networks shared storage systems, feature guaranteed high bandwidth I/O, low latency, and are easily configurable and infinitely scalable. RM660 storage is optimized to work with SGI CXFS shared filesystem to create a collaborative workflow environment where users, regardless of operating system—SGI IRIX, Linux , Windows or Mac OS X—are able to instantly share data, eliminating time-consuming data transfers and expensive data copying. GRIOv2 allows customers to dynamically throttle bandwidth across the SAN on a per application client basis. Several high-bandwidth applications can run real-time while limiting non-critical applications to the remaining bandwidth of the SAN.