MUMBAI: Sony Pictures, Sony Online Entertainment and Sony Pictures Imageworks are tapping Isilon to power breakthroughs in digital entertainment production and distribution.

Isilon Systems, the leader in clustered storage, announced that Sony Music Network, Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Pictures Digital Authoring Center, and Sony Pictures Imageworks are among multiple Sony business units that have deployed Isilon’s clustered storage systems to help unlock the business opportunity associated with consumer demand for next-generation digital entertainment.

Isilon IQ, featuring its OneFS operating system software, creates a single, highly-scalable, easy-to-use, shared pool of high performance storage to accelerate the digital media lifecycle and speed content delivery and distribution.

“At Sony Pictures Imageworks, we utilize an all-digital workflow to deliver state-of-the-art visual effects production and character animation. This unique production environment produces massive amounts of digital content, which in turn necessitates a high-performance storage solution optimized to easily and cost-effectively scale in parallel with our rapid data growth. Isilon IQ provides the high data performance, scalability and ease of use we require to power specific areas of our data-intensive visual effects pipeline,” said Sony Pictures Imageworks vice president of technology Bill Villarreal.

“With Sony Blu-ray Discs, Sony Pictures Entertainment is offering the next-generation of digital home entertainment by delivering our audience the most advanced visual experience available. However, to create such leading-edge content, we must operate an intense, high-performance encoding and multiplexing environment to transform high-definition digital video into Sony Blu-ray products. Our use of Isilon clustered storage enables us to provide our content processing applications with the high data throughput and reliability that is vital to the successful creation of Sony Blu-ray,” said Sony Pictures Entertainment executive director of engineering Dee Jordan.

“The world of digital content is now a reality, marked by rising consumer demand for new digital media and the proliferation of formats and devices for consuming everything from movies, to video games to personal photos. When we first designed our Isilon IQ clustered storage systems, we recognized this tipping point was fast approaching and engineered our products to specifically meet the demands of the digital content explosion. The use of Isilon IQ for data and image intense environments, highlighted by Sony’s Digital Authoring Center, state-of-the-art Imageworks visual effects and character animation studio, is another proof point of Isilon IQ’s ability to enable companies to maximize the widespread growth and adoption of digital media and entertainment,” said Isilon Systems vice president of marketing and business development Brett Goodwin.

Isilon IQ has been deployed across the entire digital media workflow — from creation to storage to access — for multiple divisions of Sony, providing high-performance and scalability to meet the growing digital asset needs of each company.