Infortrend's EonStor Raid Storage Selected for Digital Cinema Festival in Spain

Infortrend's EonStor Raid Storage Selected for Digital Cinema Festival in Spain

Data Storage Has Starring Role in Digital Film Event

BASINGSTOKE, England, Aug. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- RAID storage expert Infortrend(R) today announced that its EonStor(R) A16F-G2221 Fibre-to-SATA RAID subsystem was used to store all 40 hours run time of the 22 films presented at DiBA, a three-day international digital cinema festival held July 1-3, 2005 in Barcelona, Spain. The A16F-G2221 was an integral part of the StoreData Cinema Server that was jointly designed and built by SM Data, an Infortrend Europe Limited distributor; Apuntolapospo; and Digital Innovation Systems.

Digital Cinema or D-Cinema technology will affect all aspects of the movie industry -- production, distribution, and projection -- and bring thrilling benefits to cinema goers. As digital movies are much cheaper to make and distribute, there will be an explosion in the variety and quantity of movies made while the excellent playback quality will remain constant no matter how many times an individual movie is played.

DiBA attracted more than 7,000 attendees interested in the advances in digital cinema. The festival screened some of the best international digital cinema films, and also hosted free, open air film shows during the evenings presented by video jockeys in various clubs around the city. In parallel with the screenings, daytime programs consisting of talks, live shows, and workshops were run by companies specializing in digital technology.

The city of Barcelona needed a high capacity, high performance system to successfully manage more than 40 hours of high definition digital material, allowing eight different digital movies to be played to eight different screens simultaneously. They chose the StoreData Cinema Server to run the entire program. The StoreData Cinema Server is comprised of three main components: post-production, mastering and digital feed by Apuntolapospo; software to control the feed, create the film sequences and ads, and manage content and peripheral systems from Digital Innovation Systems; and a server and RAID storage system provided by SM Data.

At the heart of this solution was the Infortrend EonStor A16F-G2221 storage subsystem with a data storage capacity of 4TB, configured in RAID5. The EonStor A16F-G2221 features a Fibre Channel interface, SATA II hard drives, and Infortrend's next generation ASIC266 RAID controller. In addition to being robust and extremely fault tolerant, the distinguishing feature of this system lies in its ease of use. Because special knowledge is not required to operate the system, the solution is extremely user friendly. During the festival, individuals were invited to use the system and were able to operate it after only ten minutes of instruction.

"The festival attendees admired the quality of the projected images and simplicity of operation. A significant factor of the picture quality can be attributed to the 386MB per second bandwidth provided by the Infortrend EonStor RAID subsystem," commented Alex Young, marketing manager for Infortrend Europe. "A demonstration of converting disparate films to a consistent digital code format served to further highlight the versatility of the system, as it only took a matter of minutes to modify the playlist."

"The system clearly demonstrated the advantages of digital cinema over conventional film including management, distribution and screening," commented Jordi Sabiol, General Manager of SM Data. "With reference to the server, specific material formats are not required as any tape format is accepted. Changes to the programming are carried out with ease and are made via just a central server."

About Infortrend

Focused on RAID storage technology since its founding in 1992, Infortrend designs, manufactures and markets cross-platform, high performance RAID storage solutions. The company specializes in firmware, driver, ASIC design and development of RAID controllers and subsystems that are storage area network (SAN) ready, and support Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, and SATA interfaces. Designed to be flexible, cost-effective and feature-rich, Infortrend products are available through a worldwide network of OEMs, distributors, and storage integrators for high availability storage applications. Infortrend is traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (Taiex), ticker number 2495 and is on the web at www.infortrend.com.

NOTE: Infortrend, EonStor, and RAIDWatch are trademarks or registered trademarks of Infortrend Technology, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Source: Infortrend Europe, Ltd.

CONTACT: Alex Young of Infortrend Europe Ltd., +44 (0)1256-707700, or
alex.young@infortrend-europe.com

Web site: http://www.infortrend.com/

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