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Next generation storage for next generation studios; Case study: BlueArc and the fantastic four.

Article Excerpt
Often, storage in the studios for applications including animation, special effects, or editing, are simply a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks), directly attached to workstations striped together to get acceptable performance, measured by raw throughput. Projects that have grown in size and scope, along with a growing thirst for more sophisticated visual effects, have both caused a significant increase in the complexity of the creation process, and demand a re-thinking of storage infrastructures for the studio.

When the storage infrastructure is incapable of meeting requirements for a large project, some studios have been forced to compromise the creative side. This is done by reducing the complexity of the shots, often limiting the number of elements in a frame, which reduces the strain on the server and storage infrastructure. Other studios break the artists into shifts to try to "spread the load" across a greater part of the day. This, along with generally longer workdays due to infrastructure slowdowns, puts an undue strain on the creative and IT staff.

To handle these growing requirements, Network Attached Storage (NAS) has had to change dramatically in many dimensions, including higher throughput performance, transaction performance, increased file system capacity and scalability, and improved availability. Although there are many technical trends that are driving changes to storage in the studio such as higher resolution formats, faster networks, and 64-bit computing, the primary driver of growing storage requirements in entertainment are the creative trends. For entertainment, all things are driven by creative requirements...