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system is a necessity because if during your upgrade and growth cycles, you have to change something from path the migration process is not just about copying files but it’s about going through all dependencies and re-pathing them which is a huge complexity.”
Rueda continues: “Another interesting thing of our environment is that, in order to render a frame, a given render node needs to access all those dependencies which in size can vary between 500MB to about 4GB of information.
When you
consider that at peak we had around 300 dedicated render nodes with about another 100 artist workstations also rendering over nights and weekends that’s quite a lot of data to be pushed around. Since we do have our own version control system, one of the things we did was to cache versions of the production files on the render nodes and for each render only download those files that had changed instead of all the files.
Another thing that we
did with our version control system was benchmark the FTP and CIFS protocol and for small files we opted for using the FTP protocol that provided some network performance advantage over CIFS.
That’s
the sort of thing that we can do because we have our own internal technology handling file access and thanks to the flexibility that BlueArc provides.”
Prior to the Planet 51 project, Ilion’s storage infrastructure
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had evolved rather more ‘gently’ over time, as Rueda explains: “From a storage perspective, we started off with 4 IDE disks in our domain controller in RAID5.
From
there we moved on to having a dedicated white box server with a Promise SCSI array. The next step, when we were about 50, was an Apple Xserve with one shelf of SATA drives attached to it for a total of 3TB of storage.
And
after that came BlueArc. I don’t actually believe that the previous storage solutions are comparable to BlueArc since they were all in essence regular servers sharing their internal disks.”
Contrast this with the IT infrastructure required at the height of the Planet 51 film production process. “At the peak of the production of Planet51 our IT environment consisted of around 250 windows clients out of which over 200 of them were high end HP workstations of our artists,” says Rueda. “296 8 core render nodes out of which about 176 were HP Blades and the rest were Bull 1U dual board nodes. We have a BlueArc system that consists of 2 Titan 2200 heads in a cluster with some 90TB of storage behind them in a mixture of fiber channel and SATA drives.
We also have
some Linux machines serving our PostgreSQL databases and some of our inhouse intranet apps. We have a StorageTech tape robot for backups. And lastly our network infrastructure is based on 4 HP Procurve 5406zl switches.”
The Solution Given that Gonzalo and his team would be so dependent on the storage solution ultimately deployed in support of the Planet 51 project, he conducted a lengthy research engagement with an emphasis on bandwidth and performance compared to value. During its assessment, the team evaluated solutions from EMC, NetApp, HP and BlueArc. In order to help Ilion develop a storage infrastructure that would support such a diverse and high performance application environment, the BlueArc team drew upon its extensive experience in the Media and Entertainment industry. According to Gonzalo, “The team took a consultative approach to help set up the initial configuration while keeping costs under control. BlueArc understood how our environment worked.”
Given the cost considerations associated with a start-up, Ilion elected to scale the deployment in two phases in order to balance cost and performance. The initial solution consisted of a single Titan Storage System with a pool of SATA based storage which supported 160 feeds through 200 render nodes. Over the course of two years, this solution was able to scale tightly in accordance with Ilion’s
production capacity.
However, as the tempo of development accelerated, it became apparent that an additional system would be required. Upon completion of a full needs evaluation considering both current and future requirements, Ilion decided to
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