ST. LOUIS, MO (USA), – With the growing demand for more and more high-volume data storage in entertainment, sports, and other industries, digital partners incorporated has enlisted Burbank, CA-based LumaForge to provide dpi’s customers with a wide range of storage solutions for movie-making, television production, and other creative sectors, dpi announced today.
“We are excited to be partnering with LumaForge, one of the most dynamic and innovative companies in the field of providing terabyte- and petabyte-scale storage for video workflows,” said Matina Koronis, president of dpi, which is based in suburban St. Louis, MO and has offices in Los Angeles. Founded by Koronis 24 years ago, dpi has grown into one of the country’s largest value-added resellers of computers, mobile devices, video equipment, printers, storage, IT services, and training. LumaForge specializes in shared data storage and collaborative video workflow solutions and is “the hot new Apple Storage solution for Apple Xsan video and animation users,” Koronis said. “Our customers include many of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies, but we also are heavy into sports and entertainment with clients such as national cable networks, sports leagues, theme parks, and others,” Koronis said. “They often shoot their films and other productions on location, which require high-volume portable data storage. So, LumaForge is a perfect partner for us and those clients.” LumaForge was started by several creative professionals engaged in the motion picture industry, who realized that the wrong storage and workflow was creating huge bottlenecks in post-production, and these problems were magnified with each jump in resolution.
Editors on a shared network practically needed an IT degree to cut a movie, and anger management classes to cope with beachballs and latency,” said Sam Mestman, president of LumaForge. “It became crystal clear the storage technology that made the digital revolution possible a decade ago wasn’t going to cut it in today’s world of modern content creation and consumption. So, rather than complain about the problems, we created the solution – LumaForge workflow servers.” Koronis said LumaForge’s products — ShareStation, Jellyfish Mobile, Jellyfish Tower, and Jellyfish Rack — were developed by film industry professionals because they fully understood the storage needs of video and audio editors in the field and in editing suites throughout North America and around the globe. Their products will be on display at The NAB Show April 7-12 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, where LumaForge will host their Workflow Suite, in the Lower South Hall, S113LMR, and Faster, Together, S112LMR, featuring guests speakers and expert panel discussions. ShareStation is an excellent solution for large video teams, enabling them to collaborate on their video shoots, which require power, flexibility, and functionality with modern video workflows, Koronis said.
“ShareStation is compatible with Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and content creation apps, and meets the storage needs of video editors, VFX artists, colorists, animators, graphic designers and audio teams. Starting at 240 terabytes and scalable to multiple petabytes, ShareStation is easily scalable, she said. dpi also is adding to its product portfolio LumaForge’s Jellyfish, which Koronis called “the most innovative shared storage solution on the market today. It enables small- to mid-sized groups of editors, VFX artists, colorists, and graphic designers to quickly and efficiently share projects and collaborate like never before.” Jellyfish’s Mobile, Tower, and Rack products offer capacity of 32 terabytes (TB) to 1.2 petabytes (PB), and bandwidth ranges from 2,300 MB/second to 8,000 MB/second. “Shared storage and networking enable greater collaboration among creatives,” Koronis said. “And, there is no down time waiting because unresponsive tools, highly compressed proxies, and slow file transfers are the death of creative flow.” The ShareStation and Jellyfish are the only shared storage solutions that have been optimized to meet the demanding performance requirements of Apple’s Final Cut Pro X Library Architecture, and waveform/thumbnail caching, said Koronis, one of Apple’s largest resellers in the United States.
While dpi’s clients include major entertainment and sports entities, Koronis said she also is hoping to help expand storage services in emerging areas where high-volume data storage for video, audio, virtual reality, and AI is required in video-surveillance, healthcare, education, transportation, financial, manufacturing, law enforcement, government, and other industry sectors. In addition to storage, dpi offers a full line of Apple technology and an extensive array of related hardware and software, professional video equipment sales, mobile device management, Apple service, support and repairs, and IT training.
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About dpi
digital partners incorporated is a leading Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Value-Added Reseller (VAR), supporting and supplying enterprises with the latest technology since 1994. One of the industry’s only woman-owned firms, dpi and its team of technology professionals have helped hundreds of companies – from startups to Fortune 500 Companies- with the implementation and management of unique IT solutions. Starting with an initial focus on Apple enterprise support, dpi has expanded its capabilities to include services like IT management, printing, storage, lifecycle management of devices, consultation, training, and zero-touch deployment. To learn more about dpi and its myriad of capabilities, visit www.dpipro.com
