Entertainment Experience Selected Atrato Velocity1000

Atrato, Inc. announced that Entertainment Experience, LLC has selected the Atrato Velocity1000 (V1000) for high speed image storage and distribution. The V1000 will equip Entertainment Experience’s digital cinema transcoder with compact, high performance tiered storage, using the Intel X25-E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drives (SSDs) for Tier 0 acceleration. This will enable the Entertainment Experience product to store up to 56 terabytes (or 2500 HD movies) and serve thousands of hours of concurrent HD data streams in a single 3U rack unit, producing a solution that uses up to 75% percent of the rack space and 80 percent of the power of competing products.

"By choosing Atrato we are enabling a transcoding solution that offers much higher performance and capacity density," said Jim Sullivan, Entertainment Experience president and co-owner and former COO and CTO for Kodak Digital Cinema. "It can uniquely scale to support the transcoding of multiple simultaneous streams, regardless of source/target formats and data volume."

Effective transcoding (direct digital-to-digital conversion of one format to another) can be critical for maximizing the production and delivery of high definition video content. Atrato’s new V1000, which was announced earlier this month, offers a tiered storage architecture that combines the raw performance, storage density and power efficiency of SSDs with the capacity and low cost of HDDs. Atrato’s intelligent platform, powered by ApplicationSmart’ software, is ideal for the high throughput and data intensive environments that are typical for Entertainment Experience customers. It accelerates data for high access content and scales from terabytes to petabytes of storage.

"ApplicationSmart provides the industry with a Tier 0 storage solution that takes advantage of the increased performance and power savings of our solid-state drives," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel NAND Solutions Group. "Using Intel SSDs, Atrato users can also take advantage of excellent application acceleration and intelligent system scaling."

"Entertainment Experience provides unique value to its customers, by addressing the most challenging issues in digital entertainment and distribution," said Steve Visconti, president and CEO of Atrato. "Their new transcoding system is another example of the company’s commitment to provide high quality, high speed solutions with significantly lower cost and footprint."

About the Atrato V1000-powered Transcoder
The new Entertainment Experience transcoder integrates Microsoft Encoder on a standard Windows 2003/2008 server system equipped with multi-core technology for CPU scaling. The Atrato V1000 will be used foradvanced input/output (IO) storage that delivers extreme performance.

Atrato brings the ability to take advantage of hybrid SSD and HDD block-level optimization as well as file level content that can be ingested into a solid-state LUN. This accelerates transcoding by 200 to 800 percent, depending upon the workflow software used.

With the V1000, the transcoder can store 56TB of content per 3U rack unit. Self maintaining, fail-in-place SAID arrays provide a high performance content deep archive that feeds the solid state low latency tier offering instant access to thousands of hours of high-definition 1080p VC-1 or MPEG2, MPEG4 content. The Atrato V1000 can automatically move data between SSD and HDD RAID storage tiers to provide linearly infinite scalability.