February 27, 2006

SGI ANNOUNCES NAB PLANS, ASCENT DEAL

On the company's main stage area, SGI will once again highlight the now shipping Sony SXRD 4K projector - focusing on the content management workflow of 4K digital cinema mastering. SGI Media Fusion technology will be used to illustrate the collaborative management demonstrations.

In SGI's new technology area, the company will debut new storage products, network and storage interfaces, as well as the new blade architecture of the SGI Altix and Silicon Graphics Prism product lines.

In related news, long-time Silicon Graphics customer Ascent Media Group (AMG) has chosen the company's server, storage and networking technology as the heart of a new facility in Burbank, CA. The SGI hardware and software is part of AMG's data-centric production network solution, known as ProdNet, which offers studio clients secure methods for accommodating a large variety of deliverables.

The 100,000-square-foot building had been gutted and rebuilt to be one of the most modern and secure all-digital facilities in the world. SGI Professional Services worked hand in hand with AMG to design and integrate the ProdNet system, which is dedicated to manufacturing, repurposing and distributing large media assets in huge volumes, with no concession to bandwidth limitations.

Ascent Media Group's deliverables include digital intermediates in HD, 2K or 4K resolution, post production and satellite delivery of television programming as well as digital cinema masters, multi-language versions for home video, DVD, and a variety of entertainment content for wireless mobile devices.

At the core of AMG's ProdNet are three SGI metadata servers based on SGI Origin 350 technology, each one with eight CPUs, acting as the SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS servers for the storage system. AMG has a total of 20 SGI Origin 350 servers. ProdNet was fully up and running in September with one SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500 storage system; a second SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500 and a TP9300 storage system will be coming online shortly, giving AMG a total 100TB of enterprise-class storage in addition to 80TB in local caches around the facility.