STORAGE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE:SGI) today announced the sale and implementation of SGI(R) InfiniteStorage solutions at two high-profile digital film and visual effects facilities serving the motion picture and television commercial markets. Both The Orphanage and Pacific Title & Art Studio selected highly scalable SGI InfiniteStorage solutions to increase workflow performance. The reason: SGI SAN Server(TM) family and SGI(R) CXFS(TM) shared filesystem is the only storage area network (SAN) environment in the world that enables high-speed sharing of media assets between IRIX(R) OS-, Windows(R) OS-, and Linux(R) OS-based systems without copying files. Mac OS(R) X clients are currently supported via file serving with a direct Fibre Channel access option available later this year. "We've only had SGI SAN with CXFS for a month but the potential is fantastic. It's already become one of our main production systems," said Nicholas McDowell, IT director, The Orphanage. "It gives us the ability to scale, in both data and in serving the data. As we add users and render boxes, we can just add additional file servers that are accessing exactly the same data. The key for me, in fact the whole reason we went with SGI, was their CXFS file system. The ability to have 32 servers all accessing the same file system and serving it out to the network, or using it themselves with no impedance of performance, no bottlenecks, is fantastic. These are two big benefits SGI offers: scale the data and scale the I/O to serve that data with ease. That's two big headaches that I can stop worrying about. "With offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, The Orphanage has experienced explosive growth during the past three years and now employs 120 artists who have been creating complex visual effects for a variety of summer blockbusters, such as Seabiscuit; Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle; and the latest Spy Kids sequel; and was the sole house on Jeepers Creepers II. The Orphanage is currently in production on Hell Boy and a slew of commercial spots. In addition to the artists' workstations, the facility needed to initially connect 100 render boxes to the same data set while allowing for rapid growth. To create a scalable, centralized data storage solution with the ability to quickly and easily serve the data up to the network and the users via their existing Gigabit network, The Orphanage purchased an SGI InfiniteStorage SAN solution consisting of SGI(R) Origin(R) 350 servers acting as primary servers and SGI(R) TP9100 storage arrays plus one SGI(R) Origin(R) 300 server as a backup. The facility now has 20TB of disk space and also purchased the ability to hook in legacy Linux servers as SGI CXFS clients. McDowell eagerly anticipates the Macintosh(R) OS X client that will be available at the end of the year. "While our visual effects department is running Windows, our editorial department is based on Mac OS X. With the OS X client, our editorial department can bolt straight in to the same file system and each of their workstations can become clients to the same file system when we're editing. This means they should be able to edit SD/HD material from the same file system that we're dealing with." Pacific Title & Art Studio was established in 1919 and began transitioning into digital during the late Eighties, under the leadership of Phil Feiner. A long-time SGI customer, Pacific Title currently has more than 35 Silicon Graphics(R) Octane(R) and Octane2(TM) visual workstations, five Origin(R) 2000 servers, and four Silicon Graphics(R) Onyx2(R) visual workstations running Discreet(R) inferno(R) and other Discreet(R) software; they recently purchased a SGI(R) Onyx 3200 visualization supercomputer, which also runs Discreet products. Over the last several years, Pacific Title experienced explosive growth in a number of areas, including scanning 35mm film negatives into digital format, creating visual effects, performing film restoration and archiving. The company, with facilities in Hollywood and West Hollywood, also produces a majority of all U.S. movie trailers for theatrical distribution. With scanners capable of digitizing film from 2K to 6K, six laser film recorders capable of 2K to 4K output, four 35mm scanners, and with all visual effects and trailer work done digitally in these high resolutions at 10- or 12-bit depth, the movement and storage of data -- without bottlenecks -- became imperative. Pacific Title found that only SGI storage solutions with the SGI CXFS shared file system could meet their needs. Seeking to expand into digital intermediates, and to provide the throughput needed for high-speed film (data) transfers, Pacific Title recently purchased two SGI(R) TP9500 storage arrays and a SGI Origin 300 server, with a total of approximately 30 TB of disk. SGI InfiniteStorage SAN links the various SGI visual workstations, numerous Macintosh workstations, 30 Macintosh render nodes, 50 Linux render nodes, the Onyx 3200 and five 8-processor Origin 2000 servers. Pacific Title also purchased the SGI CXFS environment to support digital scanning and recording on two very high-speed -- 2K to 6K resolution -- Northlight film scanners, manufactured by FilmLight in the UK. Pacific Title is using up to 6K resolution for long-term digital master archiving, which requires an enormous amount of storage and compute power. "The files generated by the Northlight scanner range from 12 MB per 35 mm frame at 2K up to 150 MB per frame at 6K resolution, but there's nothing out there that can support that environment, except SGI. We've put the film scanner interface onto a Silicon Graphics Octane2 workstation with CXFS to sustain the data rate, which no one else could do," said Andy Tran, chief technical officer, Pacific Title & Art Studio. "Without CXFS, our scanners were performing at maybe one-third of the speed they're capable of. With CXFS, it can now run them at full speed, without interruption. For instance, without CXFS, scanning one frame at 2K required about 13 seconds, but now, with CXFS, we can scan 2.5 frames per second at 2K. At 4K resolution, it used to take 30 seconds to scan one frame. Now we can do 4K at 4-plus seconds per frame. The CXFS API can push the data fast enough so that we no longer have any bottlenecks that bog down the data flow. Additionally, with CXFS, our Linux cluster can run at full computational speed as well, rendering it out. We chose CXFS because it is simply the only file system that can handle the speed and the throughput we need." Pacific Title has recently utilized SGI InfiniteStorage SAN with CXFS on a number of major motion pictures including The Matrix Reloaded, Seabiscuit, Charlie's Angels II, The Cat in the Hat, Fast & Furious2, and Matrix: Revolutions. "Because of SGI CXFS, Silicon Graphics is the only company to offer a SAN wherein a digital lab or visual effects studio does not have to waste time copying files for different operating systems. A groundswell of SGI SAN sales is now occurring in high-volume Hollywood labs and studios, as the migration to a file-based and networked architecture workflow becomes the norm," said Chris Golson, senior director, Media Industries, SGI. "SGI's prestigious long-time customers including Pacific Title, Ascent Media and Tippett Studio, and renowned new customers such as The Orphanage are saying quite definitively that SGI simply offers what no other hardware company can: incredible high-speed shared access to content across any platform or configuration of platforms. Time equals money, and SGI's InfiniteStorage solutions are helping our customers bring more simultaneous projects to completion faster and bring more business to their facilities, and that's the bottom line."