DNA Productions Uses Isilon IQ to Deliver Groundbreaking Visual Effects for New Animated Film 'The Ant Bully'

SEATTLE, Aug. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Isilon(R) Systems, the leader in clustered storage, today announced at SIGGRAPH 2006 that DNA Productions used Isilon IQ to accelerate the creation and production of "The Ant Bully," Warner Bros. recent animated feature film (in theaters now). DNA Productions leveraged more than 70 terabytes of Isilon's clustered storage to deliver unparalleled quality, efficiency and detail in the creation of "The Ant Bully." Using Isilon IQ, DNA Productions was able to maximize the performance of its animation render farm, streamline the workflow of its production process and meet critical deadlines for the latest release in Warner Bros. long line of popular animated films.

"Studios and audiences alike expect us to deliver breakthrough visual effects and animation as a core component of the stories we tell, and as such our films are incredibly complex to create," said Rich Hirneise, Director of Network Operations, DNA Productions. "Isilon IQ delivers the high performance, flexibility and cost-effectiveness we require to power our state-of-the-art productions and meet crucial deadlines in our business operations."

Isilon IQ, with its OneFS(R) distributed file system software, enabled DNA Productions to harness the sheer computing muscle of its animation render farm to achieve new levels of realism for "The Ant Bully" in less time and at lower cost than traditional storage systems would allow. Additionally, Isilon IQ's unique clustered architecture enabled DNA Productions to balance its workload between its render farm and artist workstations, ensuring maximum concurrent performance for all of its critical workflow processes.

"With 'The Ant Bully,' DNA Productions has once again raised the bar for film animation, bringing unparalleled levels of realism and artistic value to audiences the world over," said Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ was built from the ground up to store, manage and access digital content and DNA's deployment of our solutions is a great use case for companies looking to gain a competitive advantage through the use of clustered storage architectures."

Isilon IQ allows DNA Productions to centralize its storage and distribute its data between clusters with Isilon SyncIQ(TM) replication software, all while delivering unprecedented business benefits. With its networked storage interconnected through low-latency, high performance InfiniBand switches, Isilon IQ enables DNA Productions to satisfy immense throughput requirements and easily and reliably expand its storage without any downtime, even while running active render jobs.

Powered by OneFS 4.0, Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides unprecedented access to the exploding stores of unstructured and file-based information, eradicating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures currently constraining enterprises. Isilon's award-winning Isilon IQ family of clustered storage systems -- the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 4800, 6000, Accelerator and EX 6000 -- are available immediately.

About Isilon Systems

Isilon is the leader in clustered storage. Isilon's award-winning family of Isilon IQ products consists of high-performance clustered storage systems that combine an intelligent distributed file system with modular industry- standard hardware to deliver unmatched simplicity and scalability. Isilon IQ was designed for unstructured data and for use in data-intensive markets such as media and entertainment, digital imaging, life sciences, oil and gas and government. The Seattle-based company is financed by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture, Madrona Venture Group and Focus Ventures. For more information, please visit: http://www.isilon.com/ .

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