Düsseldorf, Germany - Stand 5D24: Kodak Polychrome Graphics (KPG) announced today that Stark Digital GmbH, located in Pforzheim (Germany), placed an order for the Exanet ExaStore storage solution to guarantee long-term file access. Distributed by KPG throughout the worldwide graphic arts industry, ExaStore is an automated, completely scalable grid* storage system specifically tailored to the premedia applications used by the printing and media markets. The recent addition of ExaStore to its portfolio by KPG is a firm indication that the company is determined to meet the needs of the graphic arts industry and provide complete solutions for its customers. The ExaStore system will be installed at Stark Digital GmbH, a member of the Stark Druck group, to manage all of its critical data in a single namespace** and to improve access to digital files while concurrently contributing to a significant operational cost saving. Stark Digital is a high-performance company which provides everything from prepress and premedia services to material logistics. ExaStore will be integrated with the existing hardware and software applications at Stark Digital, allowing the company to achieve much greater value from the current installed equipment. ExaStore is fully compatible across all formats and protocols, including NFS (Unix), CIFS (Windows) and AFP (Apple) as well as Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X at native performance speeds. It interfaces smoothly with third party software from Adobe, Xinet, Dalim, ArtCom, Quark, Helios, and Legato. This compatibility allows Stark Digital to redirect computing resources towards customer focused projects. "ExaStore's unique software solution is easily integrated into our numerous software applications and hardware systems", said Jörg Weippert, Stark Digital's Technical Director. "This will bring our data processing and file access to performance speeds we could not have anticipated earlier." The software based ExaStore system consolidates islands of storage into a single namespace and seamlessly scales to virtually any storage capacity, performance or bandwidth level. ExaStore's no single point of failure architecture ensures automatic fail-over and recovery of any failing component. "ExaStore will help Stark Digital face the challenges that every prepress house and printer has been dealing with – ever-increasing amounts of data that need to be managed and stored. The ExaStore solution's full scalability lets Stark Digital cope with the data volumes they have today and also adapt to future demands for higher capacities without requiring significant added investments," commented Freddy Eckel, Marketing Manager, Kodak Polychrome Graphics GmbH, Eschborn (Germany). "At the same time, the order from Stark Digital confirms that by including the ExaStore solution in our product portfolio, KPG is successfully meeting an urgent need in the graphic arts industry."