The Hollywood company, which has been in business since 1919, has converted to all-digital facilities in the past couple of years. The company creates, among other things, about half the theatrical trailers for U.S. films, according to Andy Tran, senior executive vice president and chief technology officer for the firm. In addition, the company offers visual-effect product and digital conversion, as well as other post-production work, he said.

All those images require a lot of storage. Each 2,048-by-1,556-pixel frame of a movie is 13MB, and a movie plays back at 24 frames per second, meaning that a typical feature-length film takes up 2TB, Tran said. That's manageable if he just has one person working on a movie at a time, but with movies that are due to be finished in six weeks, there may be six or seven people working on a film concurrently, he said.

That's why, in the past year, Tran has upgraded the company's Silicon Graphics-labeled LSI Logic InfiniteStorage TP9700 fibre channel storage arrays and their Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. SilkWorm 24000 switches from 2Gbit/sec. to 4Gbit/sec.. In addition, Tran has purchased two 42TB DataDirect Networks Inc. S2A9500 Series racks, which are also 4Gbit/sec. fibre-channel devices, because he said they support concurrent users better than the LSI devices -- twice the performance, in fact -- even after the upgrade. 'I'm not saying anything bad about LSI, but it was not able to perform at this particular level,' he said. Five or six users can each read and write data without skipping a beat, he said.

Tran chose the DataDirect devices after testing products from a wide variety of other vendors, including EMC Corp., Network Appliance Inc. and Pillar Data Systems Inc., but none of them could provide reliable playback without dropping frames, he said. The LSI devices continue to work well enough for other functions, and replacing them all would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, he said.