NEWS BRIEFS
New York, N.Y. — JCI Corporation announced new storage service capabilities and the future direction of an engineering collaboration that was jointly announced by JCI and SGI on September 27, 2000. JCI Corporation plans to add 386 terabytes of SGI Total Performance storage solutions to its fiber optic Extranet by the end of 2002 to meet the demands for its FIRELINE services by entertainment creators and postproduction firms.
This announcement added to JCI’s unveiling of additions to its FIRELINE suite of digital collaboration services. FIRELINE Lite provides file transport using a “store and forward” approach, and FIRELINE Vault provides online storage. These storage services are available with “a few clicks of a mouse” using FIRELINE Access and its desktop interface. All FIRELINE services operate on JCI’s proprietary, fully fiber optic, North America-wide telecommunications network (Extranet).
“The JCI Extranet is designed for high availability and reliability of digital collaboration services on a pay per use basis. As the JCI Extranet is expanded and the use of FIRELINE continues to grow at its exponential pace, scalability will be increasingly important” noted John Marshall, CEO of JCI Corporation. He added that, “We believe that SGI technology is a good fit for our CyberCarrier services because the entertainment industry for years has stored its most valuable digital assets on SGI”.
“We believe that JCI has the right combination of technology, service model and committed customers to make transacting content over networks a reality”, said Jason Danielson, Director of Marketing, Telecommunications and Media Group, SGI adding that “JCI CyberCarrier services have the opportunity to quickly and dramatically improve the way movies and television programs are created and distributed globally”.
In making to-day’s announcements JCI referenced several engineering directions aimed at continuous improvement of file transport and transfer speeds related to storage in a fiber optics Extranet architecture. These included accelerating fiber optic storage area network performance in an on-demand architecture, improving file management flexibility, digital asset management and media format conversion.
JCI Corporation is a CyberCarrier that services the digital transport and storage needs of the film and television production and postproduction industries. JCI Corporation was established in 1997 to create a next-generation telecommunications network-a proprietary, interactive and dedicated digital communications network (Extranet). The JCI Extranet is comprised of advanced telecommunications network features such as protocol and hardware independence, self-provisioning, on-demand service, dedicated access and pay-per-use billing. For more information visit http://www.jcicorp.com .
SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. SGI Media Commerce solutions enable telecommunications, broadband internet, media and entertainment customers to create, manage, deliver and transact content over a vast range of networks. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide, the company is located on the Web at http://www.sgi.com .
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