Movielink Deploys Isilon Systems Clustered Storage to Power Leading Broadband Video-on-Demand Service

Movielink Deploys Isilon Systems Clustered Storage to Power Leading Broadband Video-on-Demand Service

Movielink Uses Isilon IQ to Gain Maximum Business Advantage in Burgeoning Consumer Market for Online Movie Distribution

SEATTLE, Jan. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Isilon(R) Systems, the leader in clustered storage, and Movielink, LLC., the leading broadband video-on-demand service, today announced that Movielink has selected Isilon's state-of-the-art Isilon IQ clustered storage as the primary storage system for its rapidly growing video distribution service. Movielink is revolutionizing the way consumers download digital entertainment by delivering the most popular, highest quality motion pictures for immediate viewing over the Internet. Recognizing digital content storage as a strategic asset in the advance of online media distribution, Movielink upgraded to Isilon IQ clustered storage; allowing it to improve the consumer experience while achieving unparalleled reductions in costs and IT resource needs.

"Consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for top-quality digital video entertainment. In response, content owners are making more and more content available to those consumers through Movielink. Our infrastructure must keep pace with this growth in order to best serve both our content partners and our consumers," said Bruce Anderson, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations, Movielink. "With Isilon IQ's clustered solution, the time spent maintaining this storage has dropped almost to zero! We can now focus our resources toward other critical IT efforts needed to continue to drive our success."

According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), box office receipts accounted for only 15 percent of worldwide film revenues in the first quarter of 2005. During this same time period, the MPAA also reported that the home entertainment divisions of the six major Hollywood studios produced two-thirds of all revenue for the quarter. As consumers continue to embrace technology, specifically the Internet, to transform and streamline their home entertainment experience, progressive companies like Movielink are poised to capitalize on these new consumption demands by enabling the motion picture industry to create a low-cost, friction-free distribution medium to best serve this rapidly growing market and increase their bottom lines.

"Movielink sits at the forefront of growing consumer demand to access and consume media and entertainment online. With a major shift away from physical media products to a world of digital media distribution, data storage is playing a critical role in replacing the shelves and warehouses of traditional brick and mortar retail environments," said Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ clustered storage was built from the ground up to provide the type of storage needed to enable this digital content revolution."

Isilon IQ provides Movielink with the ability to add new nodes in less than 60 seconds, delivering a clustered storage solution that is not only highly scalable, but incredibly easy to administer. Prior to Isilon IQ, Movielink was using legacy RAID arrays incapable of efficiently scaling to meet its rapid content growth and user demand, resulting in high administration costs and loss of valuable IT resources, as well as significant reliability issues. By switching to Isilon IQ clustered storage, Movielink can 'pay-as-they-grow' and seamlessly scale their clustered storage system as needed while allocating crucial administration time and resources to more complex IT operations. In addition, Isilon IQ delivers industry-leading reliability for a clustered storage system, ensuring that Movielink's ever-growing catalog of premier films remains safely stored and available.

Isilon recently announced the next generation of its award-winning Isilon IQ family of clustered storage systems -- the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 4800 and 6000 -- which are powered by the latest version of Isilon's award-winning OneFS(TM) distributed file system software and use high-speed, low-latency InfiniBand for intracluster communication.

About Movielink

Movielink (www.movielink.com) is an online movie download service offering U.S. broadband customers an extensive selection of recently released films and classic movies covering every genre, from action, comedy, drama, family and romance to sci-fi, horror and thrillers. The service is owned and operated by Movielink, LLC, a joint venture of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Movielink content offerings are drawn from the current releases and vast libraries of those studios as well as from those of Walt Disney Pictures, 20th Century Fox and leading independent studios.

About Isilon Systems

Isilon is the leader in clustered storage. Isilon's award-winning family of Isilon IQ products consists of high-performance clustered storage systems that combine an intelligent distributed file system with modular industry-standard hardware to deliver unmatched simplicity and scalability. Isilon IQ was designed for unstructured data and for use in data-intensive markets such as media and entertainment, digital imaging, life sciences, oil and gas and government. The Seattle-based company is financed by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture, Madrona Venture Group and Focus Ventures. For more information, please visit: http://www.isilon.com/ .

NOTE: The names of companies mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Source: Isilon Systems

CONTACT: Lucas Welch of Isilon Systems, +1-206-315-7621, or
lwelch@isilon.com

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

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

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