SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

News Facts

• Starz, a leading provider of premium subscription video programming through its flagship STARZ and ENCORE pay TV networks, has successfully implemented DataDirect Networks (DDN) GRIDScaler™ parallel file system and NAS solution to power its business-critical broadcast system, laying the foundation for future programming content growth.
• As an industry-leader in delivering High Definition (HD), On Demand, HD on Demand and advanced online services, Starz looked to upgrade further to a massively scalable, high-density and powerful storage platform to ensure expedited and reliable delivery of more than 600TBs of digital media for the more than 1,000 movies and original series episodes it provides to its millions of subscribers each month.
• DDN leveraged its unmatched performance and industry-leading density to help Starz nearly double its storage capacity, cut in half both its transcode and data center footprints including licensing and hardware costs, and add disaster recovery capabilities without adding additional administrative overhead.

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Powerful, Scalable Storage Platform Keeps Pace with Explosive Data Growth & Digital Media Workflows

• Faced with explosive data growth and constant content creation, Starz was looking to further optimize its storage intensive video and audio workflows, as well as performance-sensitive encoding processes that require frame by frame translation from videotape to storage.
• The company required a storage solution that would ensure consistent scalability across its environment.  With original programming increasing in both quality and scale, Starz emphasized storage performance to deliver high quality encoding and transcoding for optimal uploading and playback of content.
• As the leading broadcast storage solutions provider, DDN is uniquely positioned to support all of Starz's ever-increasing digital media workflow demands while elevating disaster recovery capabilities for the organization.

Supporting Quotes

Colin McGuire, Director of Infrastructure Services for Starz:

• "DDN GRIDScaler is incredibly dense, as we now support primary and DR storage in four racks, compared to the nine racks we had for our legacy system in Englewood alone. This lowers our storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) considerably and elevates energy and disk-performance efficiency."
• Based on our experience, we would have needed at least two more storage administrators to manage that much additional storage capacity and a DR facility as well if we had selected another solution."
• "DDN's powerful storage solution has exceeded my expectations."

Supporting Resources

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world leader in massively scalable storage. Our data storage and processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver business results from their information. Our customers include the world's leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, media production, and security and intelligence organizations. Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN's solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world's most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today's information powered enterprise. For more information, go to www.ddn.com or call 1-800-837-2298.

©2013 All rights reserved. DDN, Storage Fusion Architecture and GRIDScaler are trademarks owned by DataDirect Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

DDN Media Contact:Dani KenisonSr. Director, Global Corporate CommunicationsEmail: dkenison@ddn.comWork: 408-990-2658

SOURCE DataDirect Networks (DDN)

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