Brocade Storage Solutions Help Pacific Title and Art Studio Perform Digital Magic on Hollywood Movies

Brocade Storage Solutions Help Pacific Title and Art Studio Perform Digital Magic on Hollywood Movies

One of Hollywood's Most Respected Production Companies Turns to Brocade Enterprise SAN Directors to Rapidly Digitize, Store, and Deliver Films for Post-Production Work

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade(R)) (NASDAQ:BRCD) today announced that Pacific Title and Art Studio, a leading post-production resource for Hollywood since 1919, is accelerating its services using the Brocade SilkWorm(R) 48000 Director to post-produce digital versions of feature-length motion pictures. The enterprise-class, 4 Gbit/sec director allows staff at Pacific Title's Santa Monica, California facility to play digital versions of upcoming films-each of which is two terabytes in size-in real-time so they can create color corrections, visual, and special effects to meet directors' and producers' needs. Pacific Title, which also relies on a Brocade SAN at its West Hollywood site, has worked on some of Hollywood's most celebrated movies, including recent hits such as "Spiderman," "The Matrix," "Cinderella Man," and "Snakes on a Plane," as well as on half of all Hollywood movie trailers.

"Our success depends on quality workmanship and speed, which is why we built our SANs with Brocade solutions," said Andy Tran, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Pacific Title and Art Studio. "Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Directors provide extraordinary bandwidth to efficiently deliver a film's every frame, each of which is 13 megabytes or larger, at the playback speed of 24 frames per second. Moreover, because teams of artists work concurrently on the same movie or on another movie in the next room, the Brocade SAN easily provides the 300 megabytes-per-second bandwidth each user requires, ensuring we meet every production deadline and have the scalability to expand our operations.

"In our world, data must be delivered in non-block mode, otherwise the movie will look scrambled on the big screen," Tran added. "Only state-of-the- art storage technology like Brocade's delivers the level of performance to satisfy this exacting standard."

Marquee Storage Solutions Worthy of Hollywood

Pacific Title's need for an extremely robust storage infrastructure stemmed from its transition from traditional optical film to working exclusively in digital formats that streamline the post-production process, but produce extremely large files. As a result, the studio, in addition to using the SilkWorm 48000 Director, relies on other Brocade SilkWorm solutions to support over 300 terabytes of storage capacity provided by 4 Gbit/sec storage arrays from Silicon Graphics in Pacific Title's two SANs.

"Without our Brocade-powered SANs, we would spend 90 percent of our time just shuttling immense digital files from workstation to workstation," said Tran. "Now, with the performance of the 4 Gbit/sec SilkWorm 48000 Director, we can get the films to our staff in significantly less time. We're able to operate efficiently even under the tightest schedules imposed by the studios, and the added service benefits give us another competitive advantage."

Pacific Title's Brocade SANs support several high-end applications used for post-production work. These include custom systems developed in-house and the Autodesk Lustre solution for digital intermedia, which is converting optical film to digital formats and manipulating the color and other characteristics. Moreover, the Brocade solutions seamlessly interoperate with heterogeneous devices in the studio's SAN environment, allowing Pacific Title to deploy storage servers that best meet its ever-increasing performance needs.

"Delivering high-resolution, full-length studio films is about the most demanding multimedia application any SAN can confront, and our Brocade 4 Gbit/sec solutions handle the task effectively, reliably, and economically," said Tran. "For nearly a century, the Pacific Title and Art Studio has excelled at providing Hollywood with a complete array of high-end post- production services, and with Brocade as our partner in the digital age our best work is yet to come."

About Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.

Brocade delivers industry-leading platforms, solutions, and services for intelligently connecting, managing, and optimizing IT resources in shared storage environments. The world's premier systems, server, and storage providers offer the Brocade SilkWorm family of Storage Area Network (SAN) connectivity platforms as the foundation for shared storage in organizations of all sizes. In addition, the Brocade Tapestry(TM) family of IT infrastructure solutions extends the ability to proactively manage and optimize application and information resources across the enterprise. Using Brocade solutions, organizations are better positioned to reduce cost, manage complexity, and satisfy business compliance requirements through optimized use and management of their IT resources. For more information, visit the Brocade Web site at www.brocade.com or contact the company at info@brocade.com.

NOTE: Brocade, the Brocade B weave logo, Fabric OS, File Lifecycle Manager, MyView, Secure Fabric OS, SilkWorm, and StorageX are registered trademarks and Tapestry is a trademark of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of, and are used to identify, products or services of their respective owners.

Source: Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.

CONTACT: Media Relations, Kathryn Craig, +1-832-230-2249, or
kcraig@brocade.com, or Investor Relations, Shirley Stacy, +1-408-333-5752, or
sstacy@brocade.com, both of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.; or
Sarahjane Sacchetti of Bite PR, +1-415-284-8230, or
sarahjane.sacchetti@bitepr.com

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

-------
Profile: intent