BlueArc Gets Movies Moving Faster; SiliconServer Technology Helps Cinesite, a Kodak Company, Save Time and Cut Costs on Digital Imaging and Visual Effects Processes.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 23, 2001

BlueArc Corporation, provider of the world's highest performance enterprise-class network attached storage (NAS) systems, today announced that it has supplied an Si7500 Storage System to one of Hollywood's leading digital motion imaging houses, Cinesite, as a key part of its high-tech solution for digitally enhancing and restoring movies.

BlueArc's Si7500 significantly reduces the cost and time of Cinesite's imaging work by dramatically speeding up the process by which movies from the major film studios are scanned, stored and enhanced prior to film or video release.

BlueArc is achieving efficiency gains for Cinesite by removing performance bottlenecks at key stages of the image rendering and restoration processes. BlueArc's technology is speeding up technicians' ability to retrieve, enhance and archive segments of film data that have been scanned. Speed is essential for Cinesite, which must often pass entire movies through the digital enhancement process.

"The few seconds it used to take each artist to retrieve a file could add up to hours per day when you have 120 artists working on various projects simultaneously," said Daniel S. Rosen, chief technology officer at Cinesite. "If you consider that a color imaging suite is rented out in Hollywood for up to $1,000 per hour, then we're talking about saving thousands of dollars with the BlueArc system."

Prior to the BlueArc installation, image retrieval was a laborious process with server performance restricting the number of digitized frames that could be downloaded to be worked on to just 20 or 30 at a time. The data throughput of the Si7500 has been so high, many of Cinesite's artists have abandoned the process of transferring files to local workstations altogether and now work directly with the data on the BlueArc system.

Cinesite chose BlueArc over rival technologies because of the company's unmatched product performance and support. Rosen comments: "Until I started working with BlueArc, oven cleaner was the only product I've ever seen that works exactly the way it's advertised. BlueArc said we'd be up and running in less than half a day, and we were up and running in two and a half hours. BlueArc said our machine would take one minute to re-start, and it takes one minute almost to the second. In working with the immovable deadlines of Hollywood movie release dates, that kind of performance and reliability makes us very happy."

"Cost containment is critical in today's business environment, and improvements in efficiency are essential to customer satisfaction and bottom-line success," says Enrico Pesatori, BlueArc CEO. "BlueArc's solution delivers on these imperatives through speed, performance and a low total cost of ownership. Companies such as Cinesite deal with very large data sets, and we make sure they get the files they need when and where they need them. That kind of computing power is not a luxury in the film industry, it's a requirement."

The data throughput provided by BlueArc has afforded Cinesite another benefit: tighter version control over the many hundreds of images, film segments and whole movies passing through the 2D and 3D rendering process each day.

About Cinesite

Cinesite, a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Company, is a full service digital studio with facilities in the US and Europe. Cinesite is a leader in state of the art visual effects and digital imaging providing services for feature films, large format films, television and music videos. More information on Cinesite is available on the Internet at www.cinesite.com.

About BlueArc

BlueArc Corporation delivers the world's highest-performance enterprise-class network attached storage system. BlueArc's systems are designed to simplify the way our enterprise customers design and build their storage infrastructures, allowing them to fully exploit their networks while dramatically lowering their total cost of ownership. BlueArc is able to provide products with groundbreaking speed, scalability and low total cost-of-ownership as a result of its unique SiliconServer architecture. This revolutionary technology removes the bottlenecks that limit performance in other NAS systems on the market today. The company's headquarters are in San Jose, California with UK operations based in Bracknell, England. More information on BlueArc is available on the Internet at www.bluearc.com.