Starz Entertainment Customer of Dot Hill For Video Post-Production

Dot Hill Systems Corp.
announced the addition of Starz Entertainment, LLC to its list of customers
in the video post-production space.

Starz
Entertainment is a movie and original programming entertainment service
provider operating in the United States. The company offers 17 premium channels
including the flagship Starz and Encore brands with approximately 19 million
and 32.9 million subscribers respectively.

In its role
as a digital entertainment powerhouse, Starz Entertainment has experienced
growth in the number of shows, video clips, and other forms of multimedia
produced in its studios. The movement to HD content also has expanded the
company’s storage needs, while driving the desire for more flexible and
cost-effective video post-production solutions with consolidated storage.

In order to
improve post-production development time through data storage consolidation and
access, Starz Entertainment turned to an integrated storage
solution from Dot Hill Systems with integration support from GW Hannaway &
Associates (GWH&A), a solution provider and partner for the imaging and
multi-media marketplace.

With the new
system from Dot Hill in place, Starz Entertainment now boasts a storage
system with the necessary throughput and performance to handle HD video
streaming and processing for multiple editing suites. In addition, the new
system is scalable and designed to address future data growth.

The solution
combines Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN shared storage
solution with ATTO Technology, Inc. Celerity FC HBAs, and Apple Final Cut
Pro editing software with connection services to Starz’ Digidesign ProTools
audio studios.

With two
3730 AssuredSAN’s and 75 terabytes of fast SAS-drive capacity, the 8Gb FC storage network supports demanding multi-user
workgroup environments, enabling multiple editors to access the same storage at
the same time. Thanks to the Dot Hill AssuredSAN’s 6Gb internal architecture,
which produces faster write performance saving even more time on playbacks and
streaming, the Dot Hill solution has production humming.

The migration to the Dot Hill system enabled the Starz’ Post-Production
Group to support more projects. "We look for many things in a new storage solution – higher performance,
simple integration, and cost savings," said Michael Held , Senior
Manager, Post-Production, Starz Entertainment. "We greatly benefitted from 8Gb FC connection services offered by Dot
Hill Systems. The system is transparent to editors and producers, translating
into a very short learning curve for the user community."

"Offering a winning combination of fast,
reliable storage which integrates easily into existing video post-production
environments to support improved collaboration, Dot Hill’s powerful video
post-production solution continues to gain traction with leading names in the
entertainment industry such as Starz Entertainment," said Jim Jonez ,
senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. "With full support for Windows, OSX and Linux environments, Dot Hill
AssuredSAN solutions are ideal to support workflows using Apple Final Cut Pro,
Avid Media Composer, Autodesk Smoke or any application demanding extreme video
streaming performance and proven reliability."