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Agile by design

Digital conversion and preservation allows content to be available for research, use, and distribution. Future content businesses will be based on the availability of vast amounts of historical digital content, as well as new commercial and semi-professional content. NetApp storage systems offer media companies an ideal opportunity to accelerate production and distribution workflows, while simultaneously simplifying content access to their video and rich media archives. A move to NetApp can lead to increased reuse of valuable content assets and reductions in operational costs.

As the world’s media goes digital, change is the one constant for organizations focused on media and communications. The pressure is on to retain “eyeballs” and attract new customers and advertisers.

To grow and stay competitive, you need to face the challenges of integrating a steady stream of new services, developing new sources of content, meeting new quality expectations, and delivering new media

formats to new devices—all for a growing number of discriminating, highly targeted demographic audiences.

With our digital content management solutions you get the business agility and flexibility you need to improve your return on assets (ROA) and exploit new sources of revenue. NetApp makes it easier for you to meet demands for quality and do more with less. We can help you improve profitability in today’s highly competitive and dynamic marketplace.

INCREASE RETURN ON ASSETS

You are challenged to protect and leverage your existing content and improve revenues while maintaining or reducing capital and operating expenses. We understand this pressure and offer industry-leading solutions that can help improve your ROA. By implementing a profitable data management strategy with critical infrastructure and scaleout capabilities, you can maximize storage utilization and quickly and dynamically address your changing business and technology needs.

Align media assets with corporate IT resources: In many media companies today, the IT and creative departments work together to align the IT capabilities of the company with core media operations. They create a competitive advantage by optimizing file-based workflows for managing and delivering content to a wide range of media outlets.

With NetApp, you can simplify and centralize management of business applications and content assets throughout your enterprise. The same storage architecture that delivers improved performance for back-office applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SAP, and Oracle, can also improve performance and accessibility for online, near-line, and archival storage of your core video, audio, and image assets.

Manage more content with fewer resources: With NetApp’s systems you get one of the lowest TCOs in the storage industry—largely because of our simplified management.

Our unified storage architecture facilitates the deployment of a single, integrated storage solution, enabling you to minimize complexity and operational costs while bringing superior flexibility to your storage environment. While other storage platforms demand different software and processes for different tiers of storage, our unified architecture lets you use just one set of software and processes across all tiers of storage. In addition, our storage operating system lets you automate most complex management tasks, reducing human error and freeing your IT staff to focus on your data management strategy instead of routine tasks. Thanks to the simplicity of our data management solutions, a division of a major news media corporation was able to manage growth from 5TB to over 200TB (in less than one year) without any additional headcount.

Maximize storage utilization: Growing volumes of data impact every facet of the media and communications industry. The Internet provides an effective example: Although the democratization of content production and delivery makes for lower production costs, this advantage is offset by increases in the cost and complexity of storing and managing the mounting volumes of online content. Traditional disk arrays require that storage space be allocated and dedicated at initial setup, resulting in overprovisioning and higher storage costs.

You get seamless scalability with NetApp’s unified storage architecture.Our patented thin-provisioning technology is built into all our systems, so you can grow and shrink volumes on demand without disrupting service to your creative teams or your subscribers. This capability can improve your storage utilization by up to 40%. When you are ready for an upgrade in performance or capacity, you can expand on the fly using existing storage shelves and by simply “swapping” with higher-performance or capacity drive models. Unlike with competing solutions, there is no need for disruptive, time-consuming data migration when adding more storage.

Provide continuity of services: Availability is key to keeping your competitive edge, whether it is keeping your creative team focused on content creation, delivering your video content whenever and wherever it is needed, keeping your subscribers surfing the Internet, or billing according to usage. Our clustered solutions lead the industry with uptime in excess of 99.998%. You get continuous system and application availability without sacrificing cost, performance, or capacity utilization.

Optimize the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure: Virtualization capabilities are built into all of our storage platforms, helping you simplify enterprise data management while reducing TCO. Our virtualization technologies enable you to consolidate networked storage at every level of the storage hierarchy,regardless of specific requirements for NAS, Fibre Channel SAN, or IP SAN implementations. Because our technology displays a logical presentation of data that is not constrained by the physical storage infrastructure, you can focus your attention on critical business applications instead of hardware complexities.

GENERATE NEW REVENUE STREAMS

Many media and communications companies deliver new content and services to customers every day. Reliability demands are taxing and quality of service (QoS) is critical to keeping your competitive edge.

Whether it’s video delivery to cell phones or on-demand cable and satellite broadcasts, you must be able to quickly create content, encode it for delivery, and develop and test your new services.

Speed creation and delivery of higher-quality content

Our scale-out storage solutions for digital media uniquely address the scalability requirements of large multi-site production or content distribution facilities. Our technology speeds creation of specialeffects

shots and animation sequences for hundreds of popular films and game titles.

Our clustering software and systems support render and build farms with thousands of UNIX or Linux nodes working in parallel. You can scale dozens of nodes with multiple gigabytes per second of throughput and petabytes of storage capacity—all in a single, global namespace. Performance

scales linearly as you add additional nodes.

Because our solutions are based on open standards and deliver configuration flexibility, many popular 2D and 3D animation and editing applications interface directly with our solutions in NAS or SAN configurations.

You can use our products as a central content repository for many applications or for provisioning to more costly purposebuilt storage designed for high-resolution film scanning, finishing, and color-grading

applications. Our solutions provide a foundation for file-based, high-definition content management, so in distributed environments you can take full advantage of a 24×7 worldwide production pipeline.

Accelerate development of new services: With our data cloning technology, you can instantly create copies of your production data without requiring additional storage, helping you to get to market faster by saving you testing and development time. By using our highly scalable and flexible digital content management infrastructure, you can quickly and reliably deliver simultaneous data access to multi-platform clients and servers. We help you gain a competitive edge by enabling faster content delivery in the quality and file types your customers demand.

Repurpose content: By converting historical analog media to digital formats, you can protect it for future generations while also making it more quickly available to monetize and repurpose into new distribution channels. Our systems provide the perfect near-line and archive solution for broadcast libraries, digital asset management, and digital cinema remastering projects. Our high-performance systems scale to more than 500 terabytes and can be deployed in parallel to handle multi-petabyte-sized archives. Our systems

interface with major hierarchical storage devices and innovative hardware and application software products to maximize efficiencies in the entire migration, management, and archive workflow to help make this daunting endeavor cost effective.

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