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add a second Titan storage system and an incremental tier of high performance Fibre Channel storage.
Ultimately, the final configuration consisted of clustered Titans and 90 TB of Fibre Channel and SATA capacity. In addition, Ilion took advantage of BlueArc’s Intelligent Tiered Storage functionality which enabled transparent migration of files between the Fibre Channel and SATA tiers in order to reduce dependency on manual administration.
The Results Despite the phased deployment approach, both the initial installation and subsequent upgrades to the BlueArc solution were completed successfully. In fact, Gonzalo recalls, “Given our tight schedule, simplicity was key. We needed the system to be easy to get set-up and running. With BlueArc, there was no need to troubleshoot or fine tune issues later on.”
While the scene work for Planet 51 spanned a period of 22 months, the last 9 months of production leading to the film’s completion was particularly hectic for Gonzalo’s team. At peak production, members of staff were constantly present in order to maintain render operations 24 hours per day, seven days a week. In fact, a few particularly devoted administrators volunteered to work through the Christmas holiday. During this time, the BlueArc solution delivered sustanined performance allowing Ilion’s 200 artists to produce a
SUMMER 2010 WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
greater number of shot iterations. The team wanted a solution where the larger effects would not quickly overcome system cache while rendering input files and producing output files on 300 render nodes. Given BlueArc Titan’s exceptional performance profile, Ilion found that many jobs were performed directly on the network without issue. This resulted in not only a higher quality production, but also enabled greater creativity and experimentation by artists.
the
BlueArc’s data migration capabilities were used extensively in transparently moving files between the primary and secondary tiers during the course of production.
Although the BlueArc solution provided standard policy templates, Ilion decided to create customized versions to best support their unique work flows. The primary FC tier was devoted to sequences that were active in production. Once completed for review or finalized, the sequences were then automatically migrated to the less costly and more energy efficient SATA tier. As an additional benefit, file system Metadata was transparently maintained on the primary tier, enabling fast access across the storage tiers even if the main portion of the data resided on lower cost SATA disks.
This significantly improved overall performance without the need to maintain higher capacities on the primary tier
of storage. While the vast majority of system capacity is dedicated to frames, assets, textures and animations, the solution’s multi-protocol accessibility and common storage pool allowed administrators to also use the Titan cluster for business data, such as Exchange and PostgreSQL.
According to Rueda, the key benefits of Ilion’s
BlueArc
storage system are: Ease of use – storage and infrastructures is not our business and having one box with an intuitive interface and an ease of configuration really helps us focus on the core of our business.
Knowledgeable support – one of the key factors for my trust in BlueArc is that they understand my industry and my problem domain. Working with storage vendors that only know of IOPs and bandwidth means that we have to do all the translating from shots, frames, farms into that language. Working with BlueArc they not only wait for us to give storage specs but they can also work with is on how to layout the broader infrastructures to streamline a production studio since they have a large amount of expertise in this industry.
Scalability - whenever we’ve had to grow both our bandwidth by adding a second Titan head or by adding more storage to existing storage pools
GONZALO RUEDA
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