Isilon and Kodak Form OEM Agreement, Enabling New Business Breakthroughs in Commercial Printing
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Kodak's Graphic Communications Group Delivers New Offering Combining Isilon IQ With KODAK Unified Workflow Solutions To Enable Major Advancements In Collaboration, Productivity and Resource Utilization
SEATTLE, Sept. 10 / / -- Isilon(R) Systems (NASDAQ:ISLN), the leader in clustered storage, today announced an OEM agreement with Kodak to integrate Isilon's clustered storage systems with KODAK Unified Workflow Solutions. Under this new agreement, Kodak is delivering a co-branded version of the Isilon IQ clustered storage system, providing commercial printers and printing services within enterprises with a high performance, modularly scalable, single pool of shared storage to dramatically speed access to images and files while reducing the cost and complexity of storing them. Using this combined Kodak and Isilon solution, commercial printing businesses of all sizes can respond to the unprecedented business opportunities and challenges caused by the exploding size of digital images and files which are now a common component of digital printing operations.
"Today's printing industry is experiencing increasingly complex jobs, file type diversification and ever larger file sizes," said Kevin Joyce, Managing Director, United States and Canada Region, Kodak's Graphic Communications Group. "Through this agreement with Isilon, Kodak is enabling our customers to centralize their critical data into a single, easily scalable storage pool to share and access current and archived print jobs quickly and easily. With this new joint solution, our customers can move from production to press in less time and with greater ease."
Over the last five years, the digitization of the printing industry has created a data explosion, as high resolution digital photos and new file formats designed to produce greater color and image quality balloon file sizes up to 10 times the size they were only a few years ago.
"Like many companies spanning the enterprise who depend on digital content and large, file-based data, the printing services industry is facing a significant strain on their existing storage resources, hindering their ability to advance their business operations cost-effectively," said Brett Goodwin, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, Isilon Systems. "Our alliance with Kodak brings the transformative power of clustered storage to the printing industry, creating a centralized storage system that is capable of managing extremely large file sizes and a truly all-digital workflow, enabling commercial printers to optimize their press operations for increased productivity and resource utilization."
Using the combined Kodak and Isilon solution, printers can eliminate disparate silos of information, improve system performance and completely automate the digital production workflow. Isilon IQ's unique clustered architecture featuring its OneFS(R) operating system software provides
printers with the ability to create a single unified storage system for all their active print jobs and for archiving jobs for reprints. By combining Isilon IQ with KODAK Unified Workflow solutions, printers can automate and manage the process from the front office through prepress and the press room. Prior to the integration of Isilon IQ storage with KODAK Unified Workflow solutions, printers had to divide files across several traditional storage and tape back-up systems, creating unnecessary cost and complexity, requiring more management resources, while also causing workflow bottlenecks and slowing project turnaround.
The integrated Kodak and Isilon solution has already enabled a number of customers to produce predictable, high-quality results and optimize productivity by increasing automation and improving speed of processing. Progress Printing, a full-service commercial printer that focuses on catalogs and high-end publications, installed the system last year to support its rapidly expanding digital printing business.
"With a steadily increasing number of jobs flowing through our operation, we needed a robust storage solution that would enable us to maintain our flexibility and efficiency," said David Williams, Prepress Leader, Progress Printing. "With the combined Kodak and Isilon solution, we added 18 terabytes of storage capacity within hours, enabling us to better manage our production workflow and speed printing operations to consistently deliver on-time, quality work for our customers."
Progress Printing has consolidated all of its digital assets from three production storage systems to the single Kodak and Isilon solution, using only ten percent of its capacity.
"Based on its performance and reliability, particularly the backup and disaster recovery features, we are in the process of moving all of our company's digital assets to the Kodak and Isilon solution," said Williams.
Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content and unstructured data, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, Accelerator, and EX 6000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ(TM), SmartConnect(TM), MigrationIQ(TM) and SyncIQ(R) that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.
About Isilon Systems
Isilon Systems (NASDAQ:ISLN) is the worldwide leader in clustered storage systems and software for digital content and unstructured data, enabling enterprises to transform data into information -- and information into breakthroughs. Isilon's award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems combines Isilon's OneFS(R) operating system software with the latest advances in industry-standard hardware to deliver modular, pay-as-you-grow, enterprise-class storage systems. Isilon's clustered storage solutions speed access to critical business information while dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of storing it. Information about Isilon can be found at http://www.isilon.com/.
The names of companies mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Source: Isilon Systems
CONTACT: Lucas Welch of Isilon Systems, +1-206-315-7621, lucas.welch@isilon.com
Web site: http://www.isilon.com/
