ICT SSDs
aggregates data into an access layer ahead of the slower storage.
Building a core to edge strategy IT managers should consider a few key criteria when adapting a storage environment to take advantage of the boost offered by flash. First, organisations should think about the longer-term trends. The goal might be to create a predictable and scalable storage platform, so in this case consider optimising the environment by moving to a tiered approach consisting of cheaper and slower Core filers that are enhanced by faster Edge filer components. Locate the Core storage where hosting costs are low and high-performance network bandwidth is available. Provision it with high-capacity, low-cost hard disk drives. Then locate Edge filers closest to the users, populated with high-performance storage that will always hold the data that is being most actively accessed. Place all the NAS resources under a single global namespace to hide any complications that a heterogeneous hardware or multi-filer environment might create.
This approach provides a good balance of cost versus performance, allows legacy storage to remain, which extends ROI and ultimately allows simplified scalability through the addition of more Edge filers. There are many organisations that have already benefited from this approach, including film producer James Cameron’s Digital Domain Productions. As cost of flash capacity cost continues to drop, this approach will become the new normal.
Speeding up operations
WAN latency can be an expensive problem for any business that has facilities distributed across distances measured in miles. One industry that is severely affected by this problem is the digital production segment of the motion picture industry. Digital Domain Productions, co-founded by celebrated director James Cameron, is a leader in the industry. [
A big part of Digital Domain’s job is to seamlessly combine live action with virtual characters and scenery that’s added digitally. Each frame of a motion picture requires massive computing at some centrally located render farm, consuming information provided by digital artists located elsewhere.
For cost reasons, Digital Domain’s render farm is located in Las Vegas, but its artists are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver, BC. Even with powerful computers, it takes hours to render a single movie frame. Motion pictures are typically shot at 24 frames per second. Multiply that by 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, and two hours per feature film, and you get a sense of the magnitude of the workload.
Digital Domain couldn’t afford to locate its large render farm near the high-rent districts where its artistic talent lives, which is why it liked the idea of locating it in Las Vegas. However, it couldn’t afford to locate it in Las Vegas either because WAN latency would negatively impact performance.
The network transit time from Las Vegas to San Francisco or Vancouver was just too long, until it discovered the Avere Edge filer solution. Digital Domain placed Avere FXT 2550s at the colocation facility with its render nodes. In the facility, the FXTs inspect the data that the render nodes are requesting from the remote data storage in Los Angeles, then automatically tier and store the active data set on the RAM and SAS drives internal to the FXTs to maximise IOPS and minimise latency.
Digital Domain has also placed Avere FXT 2550s at the three regional locations to provide for local acceleration and access to non-local storage. Data written onto FXT nodes after rendering automatically goes back to storage at the site that originated the source material. Due to the nature of Digital Domain’s work, the Avere Edge filer solution speeded up operations by 250 times, turning a totally infeasible situation into something that met the company’s needs.
Winter 2013 I
www.snseurope.info S13
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