TRIGGERFISH CASE STUDY
work for our use case because we have incredibly high storage demands with specific M&E requirements. “On a recent 90-minute animated movie – Seal
Team for Netflix – we were working off about 600 terabytes of storage, even though the actual files that leave our studio for post-production are only a few hundred gigs. The production window for an artist working on a movie like this is just over two years and it grows over a period of time with at peak about 140 artists and workstations and 20 people in support all within our building (although during the pandemic we had to have remote access to our machines). “Even though Seal Team is 2K and 90 minutes long, the 600 terabytes amass from all of the component parts: all of the assets, all the versions of all of the assets, all of the scenes, all of the cache. The scene files themselves might only be gigabytes in size, but in turn they refer to textures and assets; every element, every lampshade, every character, every costume, every skin texture, every set… Seal Team obviously involved a lot of water simulations and a huge amount of procedural data was produced. You need to retain a level of flexibility with every scene which might have 16 versions and we keep the last eight versions live.”
SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE “The challenges come in the latter stages, the last eight months of the production, when you’re hammering the workstations and the render nodes very, very hard. (We have about 60 to 70 render nodes.) In creating the final renders of the scenes – and we will have multiple versions - you’re bringing together the foreground, background, each character separately, maybe vfx passes, maybe multiple vfx passes… This in turn was placing exceptional pressure on our active storage. “At the time we had 570
terabytes of spinning disc and about 40 terabytes of solid state, but we didn’t have an automatic tiering system so we couldn’t tier between spinning disc and SSD. Even though our spinning discs were arranged in a way that gave us quite a lot of performance, we still hit bottlenecks when rendering. That’s when we had blockages and downtime. It was a combination of needing everything at once, with the limitation of having a non-automatically tiered solution. We had software processes that would define latest versions that would put them in an inappropriate folder, but it was never a seamless work around. “We had this general sense that we should be able to do this a lot better and a lot easier.”
GO WITH THE FLOW “We spoke to other companies in the industry and they recommended ERA. Coming from an M&E perspective they understood the issues. We discussed the challenges that we had with Sean Baker at ERA, like our need for scalable storage without rebuilding the entire system. “Sean gives great confidence. In so many
companies you have a friendly sales team who are probably not that technically versed and then you have a noncommunicative technical team. With Sean you’ve got somebody who is technically versed from direct M&E engineering experience; he understands the issues and can identify practical options and solutions. “The solution ERA gave us was to replace all of
our core infrastructure; new switches, new servers and storage arrays. We now have a new tiered storage solution with 100 terabytes of Seagate solid state and spinning disc as NAS. “We’ve moved to the Tiger Store system, that sits
on top of the service, we can work on block storage- based clients or NAS storage. We can choose what type of work case works with each and then we’ve got full redundancy. Tiger automatically tiers
between tier one and tier two, based on date criteria and we can impose exceptions for some files that will never expire. It’s seamless. “We can now move from Tier 2 spinning disc to
Tier 1 SSD, literally with the click of a mouse. You have a flag that says, ‘look I’m here, but I’m not, and you can access me’. And you can pull it from the spinning disc in a few milliseconds enabling a constant flow. All of that is managed by Tiger Store and its almost unnoticeable for the artist. “Investing in Seagate again was not in question. We
had worked with Seagate drives within our previous system, so we knew Seagate has a robust support structure to address hardware failure; if there’s an RMA there’s a local agent and a reliable process. “We’re a creative company, not a technology
company and technology should be secondary process that just occurs and shouldn’t consume time. Storage should ideally be something that works seamlessly in the background. We want the artist to be able to focus on the creative. And for that to work, we just want things to function seamlessly under the hood. “We now feel confident that we have that
infrastructure.”
Integrity, Innovation, Inclusion. These three simple yet powerful words define our values here at Seagate. They inspire the level of excellence we work toward each and every day for our customers, business partners, shareholders, communities, and each other. They are the means by which we measure today’s aspirations. They lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s achievements. Together, they make a difference. And together, so do we. Seagate is an innovative leader within the
industry and in its 40-year history, has shipped over 3 Zettabytes of data. Seagate is working towards a frictionless future for data, with world-leading storage.
seagate.com
ERA delivers Workflow Solutions to help organisations deliver flexible, faster, and more efficient ways to address their ever-demanding project needs, whilst reducing costs. Providing dedicated support to help you make the most of your assets. ERA Managed Services include Infrastructure
and Storage Services, Remote Editing, and Media Cloud Archiving. ERA is a platinum partner for Seagate
Technology enabling us to work directly with Seagate’s enterprise division with full access to new developments, support, and training. With Seagate, we have the ability to build high- capacity SSD or SAS storage systems that are high density and high performance enabling clients to handle extreme data growth.
eraltduk.com
eraltduk.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122
