VISUALIZATION

Sun Storage, Solaris 10 Operating System Powers Digital Archiving Solution Offering End-To-End Services For Entertainment Industry: Sun Microsystems today announced that Elektrofilm Digital Studios, a premier digital media services provider to the entertainment industry, has selected Sun's storage, servers, software and services to build a high-speed, open standards database for digital content ingesting, archiving and management. The Elektrofilm Digital Media Environment (DME) will combine lossless storage solutions with web-based management and delivery tools in a highly secure, future-proof platform that is one of the first of its kind in the industry, and will enable Elektrofilm to store and efficiently manage massive amounts of digital content for their customers. "In keeping with our strategic vision of building a state-of-the-art, end-to-end digital services company, it was necessary to partner our software development initiative with the best scalable platform and architecture available," said Frank Donner, President, Elektrofilm Digital Studios. "Sun clearly understood our development process and the integration challenges inherent with a complex set of digital workflows. Together, we were able to custom build a data-centric archiving solution that transcends all other current digital workflows, and which will enable Elektrofilm to pioneer a digital supplement for traditional film archiving services." Leading the charge in Hollywood's digital migration and a premier provider of post-production and creative services including editorial, encoding, restoration, and DVD authoring, Elektrofilm works with numerous television, film and home video clients including all the major studios and independents. Elektrofilm's Digital Media Environment will allow content creators to view, edit and store uncompressed data between any of Elektrofilm's global facilities, and is scalable to all foreseeable applications due to its resolution-independent data management. By implementing a digital file-based workflow with tiered storage, companies like Elektrofilm are able to move and archive content much more cost-effectively, ultimately generating new revenue streams for studios looking to develop content for multiple devices. "Content delivery is moving away from traditional proprietary technologies to open, IP-based distribution, making it critical that the storage archive is digital file-based," said Darrell Jordan-Smith, Vice President, Global Communications Industry, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's high performance product portfolio, coupled with the breadth of our team experience, makes us an ideal partner for the production and digital services environment." The forward-thinking media solution from Sun and Elektrofilm includes the Sun StorageTek Quick File System software (QFS), which was directly mapped to Elektrofilm's workflow via Elektrofilm's own software development subsidiary, E-Media Systems. The flexibility and scalability of the Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager software (SAM) helps to enable it to integrate well with end-to-end customer-defined workflows and business processes, as well as manage multiple petabytes of digital content over different tiers of storage. In addition, Sun boosted the performance of the Elektrofilm digital archive with storage components including Sun's 6540 and x4500 disk systems, a Sun StorageTek SL8500 tape library with performance leading T10000 tape drives and the open source, freely available Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) running on Sun Fire servers.