German Digital Film Technology Integrating Dot Hill AssuredSan Ultra48

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that Digital Film Technology GmbH, a subsidiary of the Prasad Corporation Ltd, India, is integrating Dot Hill AssuredSAN Ultra48 storage system as part of DFT’s high dynamic range Scanity HDR, film scanner solution.

The DFT Scanity HDR high-speed film scanner, with integrated AssuredSAN Ultra48 storage, captures maximum dynamic range from historical black-and-white film without compromising speed or quality.

Headquartered in Germany, DFT is a provider of high-end film scanning equipment that preserves, manages, and delivers high-quality images. Using proprietary, patented triple-exposure technology, the Scanity HDR ingests difficult black-and-white materials at real-time speeds, allowing content owners to handle a range of problematic and historically aged film issues.

With the ultra-density chassis design, the AssuredSAN Ultra48 houses nearly 58TBs of data on 2.5-inch HDDs, while utilizing 23% less power in an efficient 2U footprint. Designed to deliver performance, randomized sequential I/O optimization for demanding, multiple-stream workflows like 4K film, the array can support a combination of SSDs and HDDs in the same enclosure. This footprint is 25% lighter than a comparable RAID unit and JBOD chassis combination, making it sleek to integrate with the Scanity HDR solution.

“The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Ultra48 was one of the few arrays we tested that could meet our demanding performance requirements; the Ultra48 is capable of sustaining 4K film ingest at 15 frames-per-second and delivering digital output to an XFS file system with a 16 bit RGB format,” said Hasenzahl Markus, head of R&D, DFT. “Furthermore, no other storage vendor provides this much capacity in such a convenient and small compact footprint.“

Leveraging Dot Hill’s integrated AssuredSAN Ultra48 storage with 6.4Gb/s sequential reads and 5,300MB/second sequential writes, it delivers the levels of performance necessary for numerous applications including:

Film archive scanning for mass digitization
Edit decision list (EDL)/conform scanning; low resolution
Browsing for archive and restoration; short-form commercials
4K UHD-ready and digital intermediate scanning.

“In a class by itself, the Dot Hill Ultra48 ultra-density chassis delivers twice the performance and twice the capacity per rack unit compared to alternative products, making it an excellent choice for customers such as DFT who require extremely reliable and high-performing storage,” said Garrett Wein, VP of OEM sales, Dot Hill.

Designed to take advantage of on-board multiple processors, the Ultra48 provides accelerated, predictable performance for randomized sequential workloads, making it an ideal solution for HPC, telecommunications data capture, media streaming, video post-production, and broadcasting.

With redundant and hot swappable components, it provides serviceability resulting in lower support costs through the life of the product. Also, as with all highly reliable AssuredSAN solutions, the Ultra48 delivers proven 99.999% availability. Backed by a 37-month ‘bumper-to-bumper’ warranty, Ultra48 storage solutions are available with interfaces including 12Gb SAS, 16Gb FC, 10Gb iSCSI or dual personality 16Gb FC/10Gb iSCSI.