STORAGE

LOS ANGELES, CA -- DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, has announced that the company's Silicon Storage Appliances have been certified for use with Matrox DigiSuite realtime editing platforms. DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances allow multiple Matrox DigiSuite-equipped workstations to share the same media assets and projects in a realtime, non-linear fashion, significantly improving productivity and workflow in digital facilities. Silicon Storage Appliances overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, bringing application acceleration with high QoS in a plug and play appliance. The Silicon Storage Appliance serves at the core of the storage network, bringing unbeatable and guaranteed bandwidth to the production environment. Silicon Storage Appliances currently power Matrox-based broadcast environments; this certification follows impressive results from Matrox testing, and common DataDirect and Matrox partner deployments around the world. "Using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances as the SAN infrastructure for network broadcast studios ensure that video professionals can realize maximum productivity benefits from networked DigiSuite solutions," Lee Kaburis, product manager, Matrox Video Products Group, said. "We were very impressed with how easy DataDirect's storage appliance approach made the SAN setup and management and in the various configurations we tested were also impressed with its performance capabilities." Matrox Video Products Group is the Emmy award-winning technology and market leader in the field of digital video hardware and software for realtime editing, DVD authoring, and web streaming applications. Broadcasters and video post-production facilities use Matrox DigiSuite-based acquisition/playout servers and editing/graphics workstations connected via a SAN to build all-digital networked broadcast studios that benefit from complete file format compatibility and true media sharing. "Using a Matrox DigiSuite realtime editing solution enabled by a Silicon Storage Appliance infrastructure provides customers with a high performance, easily scaled storage network that delivers significant workflow efficiencies while reducing operating costs," Robert Woolery, vice president, strategic development, DataDirect Networks, said. "The Silicon Storage Appliance provides an enabling combination of simplicity and affordability for broadcast and digital networks." 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. Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include CineGroupe, The British Broadcasting Company (BBC), Star TV, Loudeye, NASA, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories National Century Financial Enterprises, Sandia National Laboratories, and Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS, Seagate, Emulex, and QLogic, among others. For more information visit www.matrox.com/video or www.datadirectnet.com