C a s e s t u d y
PlasterCITY
Digital Post
“Once again QLogic helped our bottom line with a SAN switch that
speeds up the work of our editors and enables us to provide better
services to our clients.”
– stephen Beres, Chief technical Officer, PlasterCIty digital Post
For companies in the entertainment business, technology often creates competi-
tive advantages. When Hollywood-based PlasterCIty digital Post (PCdP) tackled
the problems of accommodating higher-resolution imagery while also speeding up
editing turnaround times, it became the first company to perform 4:4:4 high-defini-
tion postproduction entirely on cost-effective Macintosh® desktop computers.
this unprecedented achievement of producing high-definition video in a desktop
environment was accomplished by using a high-performance saN. says stephen
Beres, chief technical officer at PCdP, “We used four stacked 4Gbps QLogic saN-
box 5602 switches to transfer the enormous files to our desktop workstations. a
single second of high-definition video could be 1.5 gigabytes in size.”
to speed up editing workflow in this environment, Beres decided to double the
bandwidth between the storage devices and the Macintosh workstations. accord-
ing to Beres, “If we could double the speed of these connections, we could increase
our profitability by performing more postproduction tasks with our existing staff.”
The PCDP SAN gets ready for more speed
the editing workstations were connected to the saN by two 4Gbps links. doubling
the connections would deliver the equivalent of 16Gbps of video to each computer.
But this required more ports than the 5602 switches provided, as well as greater
bandwidth than their interswitch links.
“Our QLogic saNbox 5602 switches are great. they took us a long way,” says
Beres. “But today, we need a large, nonblocking switch to take the next step in
performance.”
the 15 editing workstations, along with digital video recording, ingest and color
correction, would use over 100 ports alone. But Beres also wanted to double the
number of connections to the 10 MediaVault storage devices and the three apple
Xserver servers. an audio room and special color-correction theater were also to
be included in the Fibre Channel connection expansion. all told, Beres and his col-
leagues would quickly require 128 ports operating at 4Gbps.
Challenge
expand throughput and cut costs of a
storage area network (saN) used for
desktop editing of uncompressed,
high-definition 4:4:4 format film
Solution
One QLogic® saNbox® 9200 Fibre
Channel switch manages a 32-terabyte
saN, which includes one Ciprico®
MediaVault™ 4210 Fibre Channel RaId
array and attO Fibre Channel host
adapters; apple® Final Cut Pro® editing
software, and aJa™ KONa™ 2 video
capture cards
Result
128-port 4Gbps saN switch increases
speed of 4:4:4 high-definition post-
production desktop processes by over
30 percent—improving editor
productivity and shortening
project turnaround times
SANbox 9200 Turbo-Charges
High-Definition Desktop Editing
at PlasterCITY Digital Post
