SGI Supports Film Industry By Delivering Significant Workflow Improvements In Digital Transition

SYDNEY, Australia and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (April 26, 2006)—Atlab Australia, a long-time customer of Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID) and one of the largest independent release printing laboratories in the world, has selected an SGI® InfiniteStorage SAN solution to manage the immense amounts of data required for the digital intermediate process of feature films. The SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9700 based SAN solution installed at Atlab's Sydney headquarters in November, supports the digital department to digitally refine films and deliver significant workflow improvements and cost savings for Australian and International filmmakers.

Recent advancements in digital processing technologies, have driven the film industry's move from traditional film stock to a digital format and was the impetus for the creation of Atlab's digital department, in order to capture an evolving market. SGI and partner Intraware, worked with Atlab to design and install the SGI storage solution to improve customer's workflow, save time and handle the sheer volume of data required with the digital intermediate process.

Within the media industry, the transformation of traditional film to digital format requires immense storage capacity and speeds to allow colour graders, directors and photographic experts to work together to refine images and colours in the film that would otherwise be lost in translation.

"Clients demand the ability to see and manipulate colours and images in real time and in high quality, and since we are working with such huge files, we need the speed and capacity that SGI's SAN solution delivers," said Rob Sandeman, Digital Supervisor, Atlab.

"An entire feature length movie scanned equates to six terabytes of data so the file sizes are very different to those used in the commercial space," added Sandeman. "We're running with 16 terabytes in a single partition, which is not usual for most industries, but for the film industry, it's really our starting point. We're constantly pushing the boundaries - requiring faster speeds and higher resolution - and SGI is the only company that can handle these large data rates consistently," he added.

Atlab started working with SGI nearly six years ago when they implemented the SGI® InfiniteStorage Filesystem CXFS™ solution to handle Digital Intermediates to allow film makers access to film in a digital format. This capability now exists in Atlab's Sydney and Melbourne offices. As part of the overall $1.7 million project they recently upgraded the original SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9300 and SGI® InfiniteStorageTP9100 solutions with the purchase of a new 4Gb SGI® InfiniteStorageTP9700. The SAN solution includes an SGI® Origin® 350 server, SGI InfiniteStorage products, Silicon Graphics® Tezro® visual workstations, Fibre Channel switches, service and support for three years.

With SGI's SAN solution, the data is kept in one central location and is shared across all of the workstations and software packages, be it on IRIX®, Linux®, Windows® or Mac OS® X. At the same time, the customer saves days in time managing the associated workflow.

"What a SAN solution brings is a quicker time to market for digital intermediate environments," said Michael Cocks, Account Manager, SGI. "We have seen customers save two days per week as a result of installing an SGI CXFS SAN solution and if you think about the number of people working on a film saving two days per week, that is an enormously significant time and cost savings."

The solution developed for Atlab eliminates the need for customers to copy data from one place to another and end up with multiple copies. The combined Sydney and Melbourne SAN solutions have increased network throughput to handle three separate streams up to 320 megabytes per second. The discs are then accessed through the SGI CXFS solution and can be displayed to clients at a minimum of 24 frames per second.

"Of the few shared file systems available today, SGI's is the highest performance and the only one targeted specifically at and with a thorough understanding of the media market," Sandeman said.

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SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. (OTC: SGID), is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI helps customers solve their computing challenges, whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.

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