Case Study | Framestore & Avere
to the CEO, we have been able to discuss our challenges in a way that focuses an informed solution. The Avere Edge fi lers were absolutely critical to the delivery of Gravity – the most computationally demanding fi lm Framestore has ever done.”
Disaster recovery
Even the best laid plans can be thrown into disarray by external events. This happened to Framestore in 2012, when the power grid at one of the studio’s locations in London’s Soho district was struck by an electrical brownout. At that time, post-production processes were running all day, every day.
“Usually we clear the farm over the weekend, but we were running 24x7, and our render queues were full to capacity. We had to restart entire job sequences. Fortunately, everything was cached up in the Avere FXT4500’s. Once restarted all jobs were back up to speed very quickly, performance levels of the Avere went through the roof and the Avere caches did an amazing job of shielding the BlueArc from the impact of the entire farm simultaneously asking for data” explained MacPherson.
Rising To Meet New Markets
Framestore’s success is leading to growth with the company expanding into new facilities in Los Angeles and Montréal. “The challenge we face is how to remain an integrated organisation even though we are geographically split,” said MacPherson. “It’s a tough business environment we operate in and the foundation for fi nancial success is increasingly based around intelligent processes and effi cient use of resources. “Managing capacity in Framestore’s fi ve London sites is tricky enough, but we now support multiple sites in multiple cities across multiple time zones. Managing Framestore’s technical infrastructure is a bit like a game of three-dimensional chess. It is essential we demonstrate an ability to distribute this computational load across a
global landscape using available resources in an opportunistic manner. Our challenge is how to shield our creative production community from the details of how we make this happen.
“We knew we’d need some form of NFS caching and are actively looking at how we can deploy Avere caching systems to take jobs homed in one city and process them in another,” he continued.
MacPherson is looking at Avere’s FlashMove and FlashMirror as technologies to help address this storage game of “three dimensional chess.”
FlashMove is integrated with Avere’s native tiering and allows data to be transparently and non-disruptively moved between NAS systems. It also keeps replicated data more closely in sync by sending updates directly and in parallel to both the primary and secondary NAS fi lers. FlashMirror offl oads the replication-processing load from the storage and supports clustering to scale data replication performance to any level required.
MacPherson said, “Our goal is for data transport processes to be transparent to the users. With the rise in multi-site working practices and the economic concerns around sharing computational resources it’s essential that the data follow working practices rather than rely on an arbitrary shuffl ing of data from one location to another. The WAN network connections themselves are a resource that must be managed and the Avere approach is a natural solution to managing this workfl ow.”
Summarising his experience of implementing the Avere FXT4500 Edge fi lers, MacPherson said, “For us, it’s all about production effi ciency and risk management. In the technical realm this becomes successfully balancing the available resources. Without a front-end
cache, the risk we carry is the impact of rendering on our mass storage and the effect this has on artist interactivity. By the time the fi lm gets to the end stage of production where time is most critical, we are managing huge renders that push storage to its limits. At the same time, we have artists working from that same storage.
“On Gravity Framestore had an unprecedented level of CG imagery being created and a huge number of people working on this material simultaneously. Despite this pressure on our infrastructure and the creative demands, the delivery atmosphere was really relaxed. It took a lot of tuning, but in the end we were able to focus our efforts on getting the right jobs through at the right times rather than just trying to keep everything from sinking!
“The difference is enormous, in terms of our ability to respond to client requests and to ‘be there’ for the studio; Avere played a key role in moving our infrastructure and our creative abilities forward.”
ibeconnects.com | May/June 2013
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