Storage:

Time Warner Cable Uses Silicon Storage Appliances

DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of the world's highest performance storage networking appliances, announced that the company's Silicon Storage Appliance is powering Time Warner Cable's digital News 14 Carolina facility in Raleigh, North Carolina. DataDirect's S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance serves as the enabling storage network infrastructure for the newsroom, integrating all aspects of news editing and playback of video into a single, seamless environment.

Time Warner Cable launched the 24-hour local news channel in March 2002 for its cable customers in Raleigh and surrounding communities. The Silicon Storage Appliance, with 4.2 TB of storage, is tightly integrated with Pinnacle Video Systems' Vortex Video Server and the Omnibus Automation system. Using the Silicon Storage Appliance as the centralized, easy-to-manage and easy-to-scale infrastructure of the production environment allows News 14 Carolina to increase productivity by having one central repository for all its video and audio assets.

The recently launched Raleigh production facility joins Time Warner Cable's NY1 News as examples of the new breed of digital news facilities that include Silicon Storage Appliances to provide rapid, cost-effective production and delivery of digital content to viewers. Time Warner Cable will launch five additional 24-hour news channels over the next year using Silicon Storage Appliances.

"Silicon Storage Appliance technology brings a twenty-first century broadcast news infrastructure that allows Raleigh's News 14 Carolina facility to deliver fast-breaking news in less time than a traditional, tape-based newsroom," Harlan Neugeboren, senior director, technology & engineering, Time Warner Cable Local News Group, said. "DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliance transforms a traditional storage area network into a non-linear storage network environment, bringing exceptional cost-savings with increased productivity and workflow advantages. Until Pinnacle teamed with DataDirect, we were limited to the size of the volume we could create that would also give us the performance we needed."

Using a Silicon Storage Appliance-based infrastructure allows IT professionals to overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, bringing application acceleration, cost-effective scalability and simplicity with high QoS in a plug and play appliance.

"Silicon Storage Appliances allow digital broadcasters to easily deploy a storage area network that enables rapid, cost-effective production and delivery, concurrent access to consolidated content, and the ability to move to a tape-less, real-time news and program system in a simple and straightforward way," Robert Woolery, vice president, DataDirect Networks, said. "The storage network implementation at Raleigh's News 14 Carolina facility provides Time Warner Cable with an easy-to-manage foundational tool for real-time news production and delivery, offering a repeatable digital model that can be deployed in production environments throughout the United States."

DataDirect Networks has created highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and lower operating costs. Using a Silicon Storage Appliance-based infrastructure to create the storage area network allows broadcasting professionals to overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, with the plug and play appliance bringing application productivity through acceleration, cost-effective scalability and simplicity with high QoS.

DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows creative professionals to increase their application's productivity, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. The acceleration of data to applications and users -- simply and easily -- allows DataDirect Networks' customers to consolidate their storage; the Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows management of up to 100 Terabytes by a single system administrator, providing 10x lower Total Cost of Ownership.

Silicon Storage Appliances bring parallelism and superior virtualization benefits to content creators and provides unmatched advantages to the production environment. For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video streams, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology sets new standards in application acceleration and plug and play simplicity.

DataDirect's enterprise-class S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance directly supports up to 512 workstations and 180 Terabytes of storage, simultaneously supporting a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations. With each appliance's ability to supply over 6000 hours of 50Mbit/sec MPEG2@ML content to 90 concurrent streams, the Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to broadcasting and production environments. DataDirect's "format independence" guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly-compressed all the way to HD and beyond.

The S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance, based on DataDirect's proven S2A 6000 appliance technology, brings a simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage and affordable storage network appliance that allows departments and workgroups to achieve application performance gains, cost-effective scalability and simplified management. Each S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 400 megabytes per second to Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI workgroups. The S2A 3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500GB to 7 Terabytes.

Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include the E! Networks, Time Warner Cable, RTL Television, British Broadcasting Company, CineGroupe, Star TV, Loudeye, NASA, NCSA, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, National Century Financial Enterprises, Sandia National Laboratories, and Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include industry leaders VERITAS Software, Seagate, Emulex, and QLogic, among others.

About DataDirect Networks Inc

DataDirect Networks is a leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent storage networking appliances. Serving IT professionals in the broadcasting, digital production, government, defense, and oil and gas industries, DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy, simple and trouble-free to accelerate and manage applications, dramatically reducing TCO and increasing ROI. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at 818-700-7600 or visit www.datadirectnet.com.

Contact Jim Hughes, DataDirect Networks Inc, 818-700-7655, jhughes@datadirectnet.com.