Dot Hill Wins Video Post-Production Project with Starz Entertainment

LONGMONT, Colo., Dec. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq: HILL), a leading provider of Unified Virtual Storage and SAN storage solutions, today announced the addition of Starz Entertainment to its growing list of customers in the video post-production space.

Starz Entertainment is a premium movie and original programming entertainment service provider operating in the United States. The company offers 17 premium channels including the flagship STARZ® and ENCORE® brands with approximately 19 million and 32.9 million subscribers respectively.

In its role as a digital entertainment powerhouse, Starz Entertainment has experienced tremendous growth in the number of shows, video clips, and other forms of multimedia produced in its studios. The movement to HD content also has expanded the company's storage needs, while driving the desire for more flexible and cost-effective video post-production solutions with consolidated storage. 

In order to improve post-production development time through data storage consolidation and access, Starz Entertainment turned to a powerful and integrated storage solution from Dot Hill Systems with integration support from GW Hannaway & Associates (GWH&A), a leading solution provider and partner for the imaging and multi-media marketplace.

With the new system from Dot Hill in place, Starz Entertainment now boasts a robust storage system with the necessary throughput and performance to handle HD video streaming and processing for multiple editing suites. In addition, the new system is scalable and designed to easily address future data growth.

Click here to see a clip of exciting STARZ content, produced by Starz' Entertainment creative team and its post-production group using Dot Hill technology.

The solution combines Dot Hill's reliable, high performance AssuredSAN™ shared storage solution with ATTO Celerity Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), and Apple Final Cut Pro editing software with connection services to Starz' Digidesign ProTools audio studios.

With two 3730 AssuredSAN's and 75 terabytes of fast SAS-drive capacity, the ultra-responsive 8Gb/second Fibre Channel storage network supports demanding multi-user workgroup environments, enabling multiple editors to access the same storage at the same time. Thanks to the Dot Hill AssuredSAN's 6Gb internal architecture, which produces faster write performance saving even more time on playbacks and streaming, the Dot Hill solution has production humming.

The successful migration to the Dot Hill system enabled the Starz' Post-Production Group to support significantly more projects. "We look for many things in a new storage solution — higher performance, simple integration, and cost savings," said Michael Held, Senior Manager, Post-Production, Starz Entertainment. "We greatly benefitted from 8Gb Fibre Channel connection services offered by Dot Hill Systems. The system is transparent to editors and producers, translating into a very short learning curve for the user community."

"Offering a winning combination of fast, reliable storage which integrates easily into existing video post-production environments to support improved collaboration, Dot Hill's powerful video post-production solution continues to gain traction with leading names in the entertainment industry such as Starz Entertainment," said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. "With full support for Windows, OSX and Linux environments, Dot Hill AssuredSAN solutions are ideal to support workflows using Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, Autodesk Smoke or any application demanding extreme video streaming performance and proven reliability."

About Dot Hill

Leveraging its proprietary Assured family of storage solutions, Dot Hill solves many of today's most challenging storage problems — helping IT to improve performance, increase availability, simplify operations, and reduce costs. Dot Hill's solutions combine breakthrough virtualization software with the industry's most flexible and extensive hardware platform and automated management to deliver best-in-class unified virtual storage and SAN solutions. Headquartered in Longmont, Colo., Dot Hill has offices and/or representatives in China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

For more information, visit us at www.dothill.com.

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Certain statements contained in this press release regarding matters that are not historical fact are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Because such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by the statements. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding: any improvement in Dot Hill's financial results due to sales to Starz; additional sales to Starz; Dot Hill's popularity and prospects for sales into the video post-production market; and the benefits or performance of any Dot Hill product in any particular environment. The risks that contribute to the uncertain nature of the forward-looking statements include: that the relationship between Dot Hill and Starz does not provide for any mandatory minimum purchase amounts and may be terminated at any time for any reason; Starz's right under certain circumstances to return Dot Hill product; changing customer and partner preferences in the open systems computing market; and unforeseen supply, technological, intellectual property or engineering issues. However, there are many other risks not listed here that may affect the future business of Dot Hill, as well as the forward-looking statements contained herein. To learn about such risks and uncertainties, you should read the risk factors set forth in the company's public filings with the SEC, including the Forms 8-K, 10-K and 10-Q most recently filed by Dot Hill. All forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date on which they were made. Dot Hill undertakes no obligation to update such statements to reflect any change in circumstances or events.  

Contact:
Steve Sturgeon
Lutz PR for Dot Hill
858-472-5669
[email protected]

Company Contact:
Ruth Macdonald
Marketing Communications Manager
303-845-3364
[email protected]

SOURCE Dot Hill Systems Corp.