Archion, Hollywood's Leading Alternative Storage Systems Provider For Post Production, Makes Numerous Company Announcements
Archion, the entertainment industry's largest alternative storage solution to Avid storage systems, has today made a number of significant company announcements, including the company's new business model of targeting Avid's dominance in the entertainment storage arena. Mr. Reuben Lima, Archion's founder and COO, made the announcements.
Mr. Lima announced that:
- Archion has named Mark Bianchi as the company's new CEO. Mr. Bianchi was the founder of the respected post production company LA Digital. (SEE Bianchi bio further below.)
- The company has just provided storage to the 75th Hollywood feature film, "New World" (from New Line Cinema.,) since the company's founding in l999. "New World" will be released to theaters Nov. 9th. Other recent films for which Archion has provided storage include "Crash" and "Must Love Dogs."
- Archion has initiated a "Tech/Re-Fresh" program for its clients. In this way, Archion clients can finance equipment on a 5/3 plan. They can amortize the equipment over 5 years, with the note due after three. They can then pay off the equipment, helping them to increase their ROI, by putting more cash back into their businesses. No other storage systems provider offers a similar plan.
- Archion has announced that Media Distributors will serve as a strategic reseller of Archion storage systems via its national sales and marketing team. Media Distributors supplies professional motion picture stock, videotape, storage and data media representing major manufacturers to companies and individuals in the entertainment, advertising, and broadcast industries, as well as to educational, corporate, and governmental clients. Through this new strategic relationship, Media Distributors has become a "Platinum" reseller of the Archion portfolio in the California, Pacific Northwest, New York, Nevada, Texas, Miami, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. territories.
Corporately, Archion has undertaken a new business strategy, by targeting Avid. Mr. Bianchi said, "Archion was founded as a company that could best meet the storage needs of filmmakers. The company was built to be highly responsive to the dynamic needs of the filmmaking industry. During the past six years, our company has consistently proven itself as a viable alternative to Avid's storage systems. We have done 75 feature films and dozens of television shows, and have worked with virtually every motion picture studio."
Bianchi explained that storage clients can spend less money and have better reliability using Archion systems. "Our clients can buy 2 terabytes of usable RAID storage from Archion for half the price they would purchase the same storage from Avid. Our "Alliance" system is virtually identical in performance to Avid's popular "Unity" system. Also, if a drive goes down on an Avid Unity system, an editor could lose all of the data, without even knowing what was on it. Archion storage systems allow one or even two drives to go down, without losing any information, and without having to re-start the system."
"We want to be recognized as an Avid-friendly company, in that Avid should continue with what they do best, provide state of the art editing systems and software, and discontinue their storage offerings," he added.
ABOUT MARK BIANCHI:
As Chief Executive Officer, Mark Bianchi will be responsible for Archion's vision, growth and strategic business alliances. Mark is known by many as a visionary in post-production, and has magnified the vision for Archion, creating new services to ensure Archion's clients maximize the return on their investment.
Formerly, Bianchi was the founder and CEO of LA Digital Post, one of the largest non-linear equipment rental companies in the world. During his tenure at LA Digital Post, he introduced Transoft Technology into the Avid non-linear market to offer his clients a cost effective option. Transoft quickly became the de facto standard for alternative storage solution for Avids.
In addition, Bianchi has served as Vice President of Operations at Varitel Video and as Director of Operations for Modern Video Film. Those positions provided him the opportunity to work closely with editorial talent and become fluent with their needs and process. As the Vice President and General Manager at Steadi Systems in 1991, he was the catalyst for developing a Digital Technology department and guided the company's efforts to enter the non-linear editorial arena.
Bianchi is a supporting member of American Cinema Editors Society (ACE) and Motion Picture Editors Guild (MPEG).
ABOUT ARCHION'S LATEST PRODUCTS:
Archion's products are designed to benefit customers by providing cost effective and reliable solutions for Avid non-linear systems. Archion's featured products include:
- Alliance: a 4GBIT high bandwidth networked storage system, fully Avid and FCP compatible. Its state of the art 4 gig FC infrastructure makes sharing SD and HD material not only possible but practical and cost effective. This product allows a user to manage and share large numbers of volumes within a project based organization. Full hardware RAID protection for all volumes.
- Alliance Pro: a true heterogeneous networked storage system. Total read/write access to volumes. Alliance Pro brings file level locking to the 4GB FC environment for complete availability across platforms. Archion supplies the 4 GB in Alliance, and adds the file level locking and LAN share in Alliance Pro. Has both SAN sharing of Volumes as well as LAN sharing in one system. Unlimited number of workstations.
- Synergy: a full featured SATA II to FC Raid storage unit designed for networking digital video systems. It is currently Archion certified for Avid, Final Cut Pro, and other digital NLE systems. This is the backbone of the Archion's Alliance SAN solution for sharing storage. It comes in units from 1 TB to 6.5 TB with 2 ports of 2GB FC and is compatible with Windows, Macintosh OS 9 and X, Linux, and UNIX.
- ideA: Not long ago, the development team at Archion began brainstorming in an effort to create a product which could be offered to fill the growing need for fiber channel networked storage at a price friendly to any budget. The result of their work is the ideA product, an affordable and reliable fully RAID protected storage solution.
- Solo: Solo is for the filmmaker working with FCP or Xpress Pro who is cutting his "masterpiece," working perhaps as a guerilla digital filmmaker, or a member of the "extreme DV" crowd. Solo offers FireWire storage, designed for a single system to support multi-stream uncompressed SD, DVCPRO HD, HDV and DV non-linear video editing systems. Solo is configured in 1 or 2 terabyte RAID capacities. Solo is compatible with Windows, OS9, OSX, and Linux.
Archion Technologies, headquartered in Burbank, California, was founded in 1999 by a group of technology entrepreneurs with a vision for designing networked storage systems for the professional video market. Archion's founders were the first to successfully network eight Avid's and one terabyte of Networked RAID storage on a feature film. As the premier and leading manufacture of alternative storage solutions for Avid users, Archion storage has been showcased on 75 feature films and dozens of television projects.
Archion manufactures high performance, high availability, fault tolerant networked storage for multiple platforms and heterogeneous environments. These powerful and turnkey systems provide the ultimate in capability, scalability, flexibility, data rate performance and protection demanded by editing professionals.
In addition, Archion offers a flagship financing program unparalleled in the industry. Archion's Tech Refresh provides clients the opportunity to refresh their technology every 36 months with a guaranteed trade in value. Many of their clients have referred to Archion's Tech Refresh as the end of Storage Obsolescence.