Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[Countryboy]

Content Delivery with Seagate FDE.

Strategically partnering for secured content delivery

Startup Atrato with is video-delivering sealed canisters of hard drives, is partnering with Seagate to securely deliver content to end-users.

Atrato contributes its radically new Velocity1000 arrays which are based on sealed canisters of twenty or so 2.5-inch hard drives. Atrato software and technology with spare drives means that the arrays is essentially self-healing. It also has accelerated I/O through the use of multiple 2.5-inch drive spindles. The V1000 is targeted at video collecting and video delivery businesses such as video surveillance and cable TV head-end functions which need the multiple simultaneous delivery of hundreds of video streams.

Seagate is contributing its Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drives with DriveTrust technology providing full disk encryption to secure the drive's content. V2100s with encrypting canisters, Atrato claims, will be able to:-

- Increase performance for serving non-linear editing, video-on-demand, media streaming, and other content-rich applications
- Improve security, delivering a higher degree of control for content owners and ease of use for consumers,
- Optimize cost-effectiveness for data centers, including significant savings in power consumption and rack space.
The ease of use for consumers might be a little hard to take on board as digital rights for media are involved.
Atrato and Seagate hope that encrypting V1000s will prove popular for the distribution of high-definition media content as it promises to safeguard content owners' digital rights and prevent piracy.

Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates and the organizer of storage Vision and Creative Storage conferences, said: “Digital content is the currency and lifeblood for many businesses. The present constraints to distribute and effectively monetize it have been hampered by performance, security and cost-effectiveness. Recent advancements in storage offer the chance to overcome these hurdles and enable a value-add through embedded technology. By combining Atrato’s robust, self-maintaining system with Seagate technologies such as DriveTrust hardware encryption, companies can yield a streamlined method to access and expedite critical issues in the digital distribution process.”

Atrato suggests several markets for encrypting V1000s, some of then surprising. For example, it cites 'home theater systems that range between $3,500 to $25,000 comprise over 22% of the market according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). Atrato solution providers will be able to create new offerings in high-definition (and, in some cases, better-than-HD) content, helping to expand the market for theater-quality video and studio-quality audio, allowing a richer set of services to this growing customer base.'

Other market areas include home downloads, digital cinema, (cable TV) head-end distribution and high-end video surveillance.

Atrato CEO and co-founder Dan McCormick said of Seagate: “Their ability to build a robust, rich featured drive is ideally suited for the content market and is exactly what is needed to complete our vision of SAID (Self-maintaining Array of Identical Disks), which is the linchpin of our core technology and design.”

Atrato and Seagate will carry out co-marketing, joint development and industry showcase solutions. Both companies will promote and co-brand their relationship. Atrato stated 'For the sales channel, the companies will use their combined technical work to penetrate new markets and accounts while capitalizing on the home market and encryption-based environments.'

They are at work now and expect to announce joint customers in the next few months.

Seagate has a relationship with Xiotech whose recently announced Emprise arrays also use sealed canisters of hard drives, 3.5-inch ones though, and have self-healing functionality.
http://www.blocksandfiles.co.uk/article/4800

MusicGiants Has Integrated Atrato VOD Storage

April 16th, 2008

With encrypted HDDs from Seagate
Atrato, Inc., a provider of high-volume on-demand storage for the high performance computing, digital entertainment and Web sectors, and Seagate Technology announced that MusicGiants has integrated Atrato V1000 systems into its content delivery platform. The systems will integrate Seagate Secure hard disk drives with DriveTrust full disk encryption (FDE) technology to enable secure digital content distribution to MusicGiants’ high-end customers.

The partnership will support end-to-end content distribution to ensure the highest quality and security available, while eliminating compatibility issues with various operating systems and digital rights management (DRM) software. As a result, consumers will find new levels of ease and enjoyment from their entertainment systems.

“MusicGiants delivers the highest quality films and music directly into high-end customers’ home theater systems,” said Scott Bahneman, CEO of MusicGiants. “We have over 40 manufacturers that are integrating our HD content store in their audio and video equipment, so we have to support several different configurations. This new system from Atrato and Seagate provides us with the extreme availability, bandwidth, reliability and security we need to make sure our customers have a flawless experience today and into the future.”

As a leader in the distribution of HD entertainment, MusicGiants provides a unique platform that delivers high quality content directly into home theaters. Currently the only digital music company licensed in HD from all of the major music labels; MusicGiants recently expanded its high quality content offering to include movies and television with its new VideoGiants service.

MusicGiants’ content makes its partners hardware look and sound better because MusicGiants delivers the full amount of data that makes up a song or film, instead of eliminating bits of the data to save on delivery or storage costs like all other digital service providers do. Because of this, the demands on MusicGiants delivery system are severe. “Sometimes music or video purchased from us is ten times the size of the same song or film obtainable from another provider so our delivery systems have to be up to the task,” said Bahneman.

MusicGiants’ content delivery vault is at the heart of its distribution model. The content delivery vault embeds Atrato’s V1000 storage system and functions as an ingest engine, distribution platform and format processing system. Atrato’s V1000 was selected for its ability to meet the high I/O bandwidth and multi-platform support for high bit-rate quality video and music.

The content delivery vault also incorporates Seagate Secure encrypted drives to ensure multiple layers of security throughout the distribution process. At the data level, block level encryption is used to secure data while in-flight between various storage elements. At the system level, disk drives run compatibility checks and provide content access only with the assigned system enclosure.

“Consumers of high-definition, high-fidelity entertainment will love this solution,” said Patrick King, senior vice president of Seagate’s Consumer Solutions Division. “Through the Atrato/Seagate partnership, owners of high-end home entertainment systems will now have the content to match the quality of their systems. And content providers will also win with the security and flexibility of the MusicGiants digital content delivery system.”

“MusicGiants has a strong vision for end-to-end secure content delivery and is bringing new innovations and advancements to the market,” said Steve Visconti, EVP of Atrato. “We are pleased that the company has chosen our V1000 system to provide the intelligence and power behind their content delivery vault. MusicGiants quickly recognized the power of the system to address the sheer volume of content they are managing, across multiple formats.”
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/systems/seagate-atrato-musicgiants-hdd-encrypted-vod

CES: Paramount endorses hard drives

Here's an unusual first. Paramount Pictures announced a deal Wednesday to let MusicGiants, an online music store that caters to audiophiles, sell collections of movies loaded onto hard drives. Buyers will be able to transfer the contents of those drives onto personal computers or, more likely, home media servers. The deal marks the first time Paramount -- and probably any major Hollywood studio -- has let its films be a) delivered on hard drives and b) loaded in bulk onto home servers. MusicGiants will also be able to sell downloadable titles one by one through its new online video store, dubbed VideoGiants, although it doesn't plan to do so until later this year.

The agreement is more of a baby step than a flying leap for Paramount. It covers only a subset of the studio's catalog -- just the titles cleared for permanent downloadings, many of which are older ones such as "Mission: Impossible" and "Braveheart." Initially, the movies won't even be in high definition. Nor does MusicGiants pose much of a piracy risk. The movies on the hard drive are encrypted, and they stay that way even after they're transferred onto a home server. Also, rather than trying to compete with Apple's iTunes store, the company has focused on selling pricey encyclopedic collections and pristine quality tracks to high-end customers. The first users of the download store, in fact, are likely to be owners of expensive custom home entertainment systems. The company has deals with the makers of at least eight home-theater companies to pre-install the VideoGiants store software onto their home media servers.

Nevertheless, the announcement is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the industry is still struggling to figure out how to let consumers load media servers -- think of them as audio/video jukeboxes in the home -- with copies of the movies they buy on copy-protected DVDs and high-definition discs. They've been working on a standard approach to "managed copy" for months, and yet there's still no agreement among the studios, tech companies and consumer-electronics manufacturers. Second, don't forget the tale of woe told by Kaleidescape, another company selling high-end home entertainment products. Kaleidescape's CEO, Michael Malcolm, has said he tried in vain to persuade the studios to let his company sell high-priced home media servers with packages of movies loaded onto their hard drives. Despite the fact that these systems had military-grade security and princely price tags -- the least expensive system sold for about $25,000 -- Kaleidescape couldn't win over the studios. So it found a clever way to record movies off of the DVDs its customers bought, prompting a lawsuit by the DVD Copy Control Association (a judge sided with Kaleidescape) and repeated efforts by the studios to change the licensing rules for DVDs to push Kaleidescape out of compliance. If MusicGiants can persuade more studios that loading home servers with authorized copies of movies is a good thing, perhaps there's hope yet for Kaleidescape.
http://opinion.latimes.com/bitplayer/2008/01/ces-paramount.html