Starz Entertainment Goes HD With Archion

Archion, the media and entertainment industry’s provider of intelligent storage solutions for content creation, announced that Starz Entertainment has deployed a 24 TB Alliance Pro storage system to enable a shared storage environment that would maximize their high bandwidth requirements. The new SAN has allowed Starz Entertainment to meet their HD bandwidth requirements across Apple, Adobe and Autodesk platforms.

Michael Price, Senior Designer/Tech Specialist, Starz Entertainment Design Group, said, "We at Starz recently re-launched all of our graphics packages in HD, and we needed the HD bandwidth for our storage solution. We are utilizing Archion?s Alliance Pro storage so we could have multiple HD uncompressed systems. It?s been working perfectly well. I was also very impressed with Archion’s Technical Support."

"We needed a cost-effective SAN solution that could handle both PC and Mac uncompressed HD bandwidth, along with maximizing the amount of storage we could achieve," added Doug Reither, Starz Entertainment Engineering Supervisor. "The staff at Archion was very proactive in answering all of our technical concerns before the purchase. The support they have provided through the installation process and beyond has been excellent."

"Starz Entertainment faced several challenges when it came to finding a file-level blocking SAN solution that would handle their HD bandwidth requirements," said Dan Stern, Archion’s Executive Vice President of Sales. "We were confident that our Alliance Pro? would meet their requirements and we are delighted that they gave us an opportunity to prove it."

Michael Linde, Starz Entertainment IT Department Mac Specialist, said: "We have been using the Alliance Pro to store our promo spots in both HD and SD, and it’s been working very well for us. We tried another solution in the recent past for HD storage that didn’t work properly in either Mac or PC formats, but the Alliance Pro works equally well in both of those platforms in a very effective manner. Also, the product’s management interface is easy to use and was well put together."

About Alliance Pro
Alliance Pro is a complete file-level locking SAN for demanding post-production and graphics environments. It is a complete SAN system that works across both Fibre Channel and LAN networks. Storage, Metadata server, software and cables are all included. The storage is the Award winning Synergy HD.

Among the benefits of the Alliance Pro are:

• Large Storage Capacity – Each storage chassis is fully populated with sixteen drives, and creates capacities of up to 16TB with enterprise class 1TB SATA II drives. Independent SATA II drive channels provide the maximum in performance and availability;
• High Throughput – The dual 4GB Fibre Channel host ports provide up to 800MB/sec bandwidth with full access to storage on all ports. Additional storage chassis aggregate bandwidth;
• Complete Data Protection – High speed, high availability RAID controller brings full RAID protection; Total Uptime – Even during rebuilds, Synergy HD4 Alliance Pro users can continue to work. Drive failure is no longer a major issue that stops productivity;
• Expandable – Alliance Pro is standard with 4 Fibre Channel and 4 LAN seats, but can expand to an almost infinite amount of clients seats by adding an additional FC switches, storage chassis, and SAN or LAN software seats
• Management – SAN management is available on all clients. Access to Volumes are easily changed at the administration level. Multiple storage definitions are available for zoning and management of large storage number of storage volumes.