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Storage Supplement 2016

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12 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2016 STORAGE SOLUTIONS ASPERA HELPS POWER BERLINALE FESTIVAL ARMONK, NY – IBM's Aspera (www.asperasoft.com) company was selected as an Official Supplier for the 66th Berlin International Film Festival, which took place from February 11th through the 21st. This marks the second consecutive year the company has been tapped for secure, file-based film delivery at the event, which attracts more than 300,000 attendees. Berlinale showcases some 400 films of every genre, length and format on more than 60 different screens, totaling over 2,500 screenings. Building on the Aspera workflow deployed in 2015, Berlinale added Aspera Orchestrator to automate and streamline its internal workflows. Integrated into their existing, automated QC and distribution processes, Aspera Orchestrator analyzes, validates, and manages all incoming digital packages and automatically passes them on to the primary storage in the data center. With 4K films continuing to play a large part in the festival's line-up, the organizers again deployed Aspera Shares to efficiently and securely handle the increased digital file sizes of 4K films. The solution enables the high-speed, file-based ingest of fea- ture-length films from participants directly to Ber- linale's data center in Berlin. All films for the festival program and the European Film Market are stored as DCPs on a huge server, with 250 films transferred daily to the various festival cinemas. With film files of up to 250GBs each, the growing demand to ingest and share large files digitally from multiple locations across the globe has driven the need for faster transfer speeds, improved reliabili- ty, and a streamlined digital workflow. With Aspera Shares, the organizers could use their full 10GB fiber connection to receive DCP files quickly and securely regardless of distance and network conditions. In addition to Aspera Shares and Orchestrator, Ber- linale also used Aspera Console for complete visibility and realtime tracking and control over transfers. As- pera Connect Server powers the architecture with the Aspera FASP protocol, allowing the large number of participants to exchange their files quickly and reliably over the wide area network. SKYCAR UPGRADES WITH SMALL TREE'S TITANIUMZ-8 SAN FRANCISCO — Design and video production company Skycar Creative, here, recently switched to Small Tree (www.small-tree.com) storage to help streamline their workflow and improve project management. Skycar Creative is a Bay Area produc- tion company that focuses on cinematic live-action and design-driven motion graphics. Only a year old, the studio has already worked on jobs for Adobe Systems, Yahoo!, and the Ad Council. Skycar's core strengths include concepting, design and execution. "We had to find a system that would work for our budget, our current scale and be scalable for the future," explains Aaron Barry, creative director/ co-founder of Skycar. "We're a brand-new company looking to grow and couldn't afford something huge initially. Small Tree provided a perfect solution to fit our current and long-term needs." Skycar selected Small Tree's TitaniumZ-8 due to its ability to support numerous multimedia content cre- ation workstations with a flexible mix of Gigabit Eth- ernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet configuration options. The TitaniumZ-8 is designed for realtime video editing workflows. Prior to installing the Small Tree solution, the company relied heavily on external drives for data transfer, which were cumbersome and only allowed certain people to be editing at once. "Today, we can hop on a Mac at any of our eight editing suites and the project loads up immediately," says Barry. "The TitaniumZ-8 can have three or four people running HD or 4K content, either working with editing or color correction or motion graphics, and can transfer files quickly from project to project." Skycar also appreciates Small Tree's tech support team and their willingness to work with non-Small Tree hardware. "We've gotten to know and love the support team," says Barry. "They've been great and super re- sponsive. They've definitely gone above and beyond to help us figure out any performance issues." A recent greenscreen project at Skycar. The recent Berlinale festival employed Aspera technology.

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