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Billerica, MA, April 30, 2007 – IBRIX® Inc., the leader in scalable file serving solutions, today announced that Imagi Studios, the major global animation studio headquartered in Hong Kong, has chosen IBRIX Fusion™ to prime the company for continued rapid growth and to expand the capacity of its feature film production pipeline. On the heels of its success with the March 2007 theatrical release of TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Imagi has established aggressive plans to deliver one movie every eight months and enhance its animation technology to provide movie-goers a superior viewing experience. IBRIX Fusion, a breakthrough file serving solution, provides Imagi with the reliability and performance scalability needed to meet their goals.
Imagi’s mission is to create a slate of high-quality CG-animated feature films with superhero themes to entertain global audiences. To do so, Imagi recognized the need to ramp up its computer processing power to manage its animation rendering requirements. A single film may be comprised of hundreds of thousands of frames, each rendered digitally. The ability to quickly and efficiently deliver the files needed to build those frames is a vital factor in meeting film production schedules.
“As we embark on our next two projects, Gatchaman and Astro Boy, it is imperative we have in place a computing infrastructure that will meet the strong demands placed on our rendering application during production,” said Peter Pang, M.I.S. manager at Imagi. “We were looking for a solution capable of handling billions of data requests per day and IBRIX Fusion has demonstrated success with these requirements. With this solution in place we expect to improve our rendering and achieve our aggressive production goals.”
Imagi will utilize sixteen IBRIX Fusion file servers and EMC® CLARiiON® CX3-80 storage to manage its needs on the studio’s upcoming films, Gatchaman and Astro Boy, scheduled for release in 2008 and 2009 respectively, along with future projects. The joint solution allows Imagi to grow its file serving capacity by over fifty percent, which will significantly increase its computing capabilities.
“In order to delight audiences with richer visual content, media and entertainment companies like Imagi are making extraordinary ongoing advancements in their computing technology,” said Shaji John, Chief Executive Officer, IBRIX. “To keep up with these advances, Imagi requires fast, scalable access to data in order to meet production deadlines and ensure the highest quality images. We are extremely pleased they selected IBRIX to help them overcome these challenges and we look forward to the success of Gatchaman, Astro Boy and all future Imagi films.”
IBRIX Fusion is uniquely designed to significantly increase rendering performance for animated film production where current file serving techniques cannot scale to deliver adequate performance for this predominantly small file, metadata intensive, cache-friendly application. First, IBRIX delivers exceptional data throughput to rendering nodes for both large and small files. Next, performance may be scaled by adding more cache to the file servers or by simply adding more file servers. Finally, IBRIX provides tremendous flexibility by dedicating separate servers for read and write operations and independent, online scaling of performance and capacity.
About Imagi Studios
Imagi International Holdings Limited, a listed company (stock code 585) on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, entered the animation business in 2000 when it established Imagi Studios in Hong Kong, and subsequently in 2004 a creative development and production facility in Los Angeles and a satellite office in Tokyo. The company produces major CG-animated theatrical movies for global audiences, including the March 2007 release, TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Its production pipeline in Hong Kong currently employs 450 animators; a staff of 50 is involved in story development and production management at its U.S. facility.
About IBRIX, Inc.
IBRIX® delivers increased application performance to enterprise computing environments utilizing a unique parallel file serving solution. IBRIX Fusion™ is comprised of a single namespace parallel file system, a scalable volume manager, high availability features, and a comprehensive management interface. IBRIX Fusion is the most scalable, economical, multi-purpose file serving solution available for cluster computing, grid computing, and enterprise computing environments. Based on IBRIX’s patented Segmented File System™, IBRIX Fusion increases application performance, simplifies administration, and reduces total cost of ownership. The IBRIX Fusion file serving solution is available through leading OEMs. For more information, visit www.ibrix.com.
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IBRIX, IBRIX Fusion, and Segmented File System are trademarks of IBRIX, Inc. All other brands, products, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are associated.