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UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP PICKS GLOBALSTOR FOR NEW IN-HOUSE STUDIO’S DATA STORAGE SOLUTION

“It Centralizes the Whole Process and Makes Everything Easily Searchable.”

CHATSWORTH, CA, November 6, 2006:

Engineer/producer Tal Herzberg along with Geffen Records chairman Ron Fair have produced and recorded countless hits for artists including Black Eyed Peas, Pussycat Dolls, and Mary J. Blige. Geffen Records has acquired an ExtremeStor-iTrax T160 storage server from Globalstor Data Corporation for the Interscope Geffen A&M (IGA) label group’s new in-house recording studio.

Secure and reliable storage of an enormous volume of content is of paramount importance to IGA, a division of Universal Music Group, which is the world’s largest record company. Globalstor’s considerable experience in the film and video post-production industry, as well as the broader information technology sector, led Herzberg to its ExtremeStor-iTrax T160. IGA preferred the 16-drive solution that includes two separate RAID controllers.

While IGA’s studio is under construction, Herzberg and Fair continue to work at the Record Plant. This is a state-of-the-art, five-room recording facility that has served as their base for the past five years. Herzberg says, “Globalstor’s ExtremeStor-iTrax T160 has seamlessly integrated into the Record Plant’s infrastructure. This solution will accommodate IGA’s new studio, and will function in virtually any other IGA facility.”

“Frequently we work at the same time in Studios 2 and 4 or Studios 3 and 5. Instead of moving everything around and carrying hard drives all over the place, we now have the Globalstor server located in the facility’s machine room. There’s no infrastructure, and you’re not required to set up a whole fibre channel network in your facility. It is literally plug and play. No matter which room I go to, I just log into it and off I go. It’s so simple!” Globalstor’s ExtremeStor series of robust and flexible server platforms represents a quantum leap forward from the “sneaker net” of removable hard drives or an expensive and cumbersome fibre channel infrastructure. This solution delivers a comprehensive, centralized, and searchable database. In the professional audio industry, Globalstor data storage solutions are used in conjunction with Pro Tools and other digital audio workstation software on both Macintosh and Windows platforms.

Using an iSCSI initiator, the ExtremeStor-iTrax appears as a local disc drive on any computer. It has a pair of iSCSI initiators for Mac bundled with each Globalstor solution, while Windows users can download the free Windows iSCSI initiator offered by Microsoft. Globalstor solutions can also be used as NAS (Network Attached Storage) servers in conjunction with iSCSI.

“If I mount 10 of those hard drives and hit search snare drum for example, I can get four years’ worth of snare drum history that I’ve used on our projects,” says Herzberg. “Searching through hard drives became a nightmare. It’s not just the fact that data was on separate mechanisms; it’s also what’s involved with loading and unloading, mounting and unmounting, or running a complicated manual database of everything. Now that it’s all concentrated in one box with redundant backup, a huge, searchable volume of data is at your disposal. Instead of sitting down with 250 gigabytes of hard drive at a time, I now have nine terabytes of hard drives in front of me. This is a huge library of work that we’ve created over the last several years. We have room for two or three years ahead of time without having to worry about buying a bunch of new hard drives.”

Herzberg recalls a recent instance in which the ExtremeStor-iTrax T160 allowed him to easily resolve a challenging situation. Herzberg explains that he was on vacation in Maui, and an emergency came up in L.A. that he had to turn his attention to quickly. While hosting his laptop on the hotel’s wireless network, Herzberg launched the iSCSI initiator, which comes with the iTrax, and logged straight into his server mounted on the laptop’s desktop.

“I was able to mount one of our hard drives that were in the server to my desktop, as if I was there in the studio,” Herzberg continues. “I dragged and dropped the stuff from the hard drive, did my work, dropped it back and was done! The fact that you can access your entire database from anywhere in the world is just priceless. Whether I am in New York, Maui, or Australia, my entire database is available and accessible. I can protect it in many ways, and allow some of our clients to access certain sections. It’s just like a normal hard drive: you see the folders, you drag and drop, and have no notion that you’re not physically located next to it.”

Headquartered in Chatsworth, CA, Globalstor Data Corporation is a leading distributor of high performance RAID, SAN and storage/video servers. Widely recognized for its value-added services, including systems integration and customer support, Globalstor is an OEM with a full spectrum of hardware and software support offering a broad spectrum of broadcast and video professional solutions including DVD-R Digital Video Dailies solutions, 2K and 4K Digital Intermediate solutions, and high-performance hi-definition video servers offering scaleable storage up to 24TB’s in a single server. Globalstor serves a worldwide customer base from its U.S. headquarters in Chatsworth, California and internationally through a strong foundation of over-seas authorized resellers.