Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/13405
Storage for VFX Stargate’s artists use Nexsan storage solutions when working on VFX for series like 24 — here they created a New York street scene for the show. was gone.We had two or three incidents where 600GB or more of data were lost,” he recalls. Meier was charged with finding a way to make data less vulnerable to loss and increase storage for the company’s Avid editing systems. Hailing from academia “where we do lots of experiments,” he convinced several ven- dors to provide storage systems that he could test at Stargate under “real-world conditions.” He found Nexsan’s ATABoy parallel ATA disk storage was “very robust, reasonably fast, with a lot of good features” even though it was “a bit on the expensive side.”The company in- stalled four ATABoys, one of the chassis dedi- cated to VFX storage, and used them “very successfully for quite a while.” But “the appetite for storage in this indus- try grows at an astonishing rate,” Meier dis- covered. So Stargate returned to Nexsan for upgrades and now runs four SATABeast 42- drive units, two of which are Xi systems for primary enterprise file serving and D2D (disk-to-disk) backup and recovery; one SA- TABoy for Final Cut editorial; and a SAT- ABlade eight-disk 1U chassis.The four origi- nal ATABoys are still in service, too. “Probably 80 percent of our storage is on Nexsan chassis now,” he reports. “We’ve been very happy with the products and their usability and flexibility, and Nexsan technical support has been outstanding.” Perhaps most important, the systems are “very heavily used and keep chugging along without you thinking about them.We rely on them to keep functioning without us worrying about them.” Stargate has been the primary VFX house for numerous popular shows, including 24. “With a series as high profile as that you have to be certain that there aren’t any hic- cups with how your data is stored and used,” Meier emphasizes.“Some big episodes fea- tured a large number of shots that took artists quite a while to set up and render while meeting tight episodic deadlines.” 28 Post • July 2010 He likes Nexsan’s D2D backup, which “provides a safety net” for important jobs. “For projects of any size there’s always a hot copy elsewhere on the system that’s in- stantly retrievable,” he notes. Meier is “experimenting with other con- cepts to make the systems more robust and scale out even better. Our ultimate goal is to have a system that’s big and robust enough that we don’t have to rely on tape except for deep archiving and disaster recovery.” He notes that “hardware is becoming more resilient and the capacity of hard dri- ves keeps increasing — SAS drives will hit the terabyte level soon.The idea of RAID-6 has been introduced in the last couple of City, MI, has found that its Isilon IQ6000x clus- tered storage system has enabled the com- pany to “go from concepts on paper to im- plementing real-world solutions,” says founder/executive producer David Kenneth. “We were a small company concerned about the price point of storage, but we wanted something that could grow beyond what we imagined at the time,” he notes. “With Isilon, we found a storage solution that could adapt organically to our changing demands.As a business owner, I have one less thing to keep me up at night!” Isilon’s clustered storage is key to its adaptability and scalability, he points out.“We can plug in another cluster of storage and the IQ system acts as one drive, just with more space available.” In addition, the “GUI to man- age storage is also dead simple — you don’t need an engineering degree to program the machine,” and the Snapshot function allows the company to sync systems in its Culver City and Traverse City locations almost in- stantaneously.What’s more, Isilon “acts like a very small drive in terms of speed” despite offering large amounts of storage. IE Effects installed its Isilon storage just after it began work on the stereo 3D center- piece for the China Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai China; the job was in production si- multaneously with another 3D theme park IE Effects employs Isilon IQ6000x clusters when working on projects like this one for a China Pavilion ride film, which is being displayed on multiple screens. years and a new, more fault-tolerant version is pretty exciting. Storage manufacturers are under pressure to keep up to customers’ demands, and a lot of interesting technology that’s come out in the last 18 months will be important to keep us moving forward.” IE EFFECTS As a digital facility with an emphasis on stereoscopic filmmaking, IE Effects (www.ieef- fects.com) of Culver City, CA, and Traverse www.postmagazine.com project for China and several commercials and TV projects in 2D.The China Pavilion ride film is being displayed on multiple screens, some of them curved up to 180 degrees. “We had dual images in excess of 4K so we needed a lot of bandwidth and storage capacity,” Kenneth notes.“The speed at which we were able to connect artists to the con- tent increased five-fold when we imple- mented Isilon.We were constantly accessing elements for 3D modeling and compositing.”