Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/47583
• AD VER T ORIAL • MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT Cinesite adopts BlueArc Mercury for high-performance storage hard disk drives. The estate has since grown to an eight -Mercury 100 cluster with 118 TB of high-performance SAS storage and over 520TB of near-line SAS drives. "BlueArc gives us a tiered storage solution that allows us to put a hot file that SUMMARY As one of the world's leading visual effects houses, Cinesite is no stranger to having to store and transport enormous amounts of digital content. The com- pany maintains state-of-the-art production facilities in London with a satellite of- fice in Los Angeles, and produces cutting-edge visual effects for feature films. Its client base is located around the world. Cinesite's credits include such block- busters as Harry Potter & the Deadly Hallows: Part 1, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the upcoming John Carter of Mars, and many, many more. In August of 2010, Cinesite started offering stereoscopic 3D services to its clientele. THE CHALLENGE: Accommodate rapid growth and improve data man- agement of very large media files Cinesite has up to eight highly demanding projects moving through its pipeline at any given time. Accommodating client demand for increasingly so- phisticated visual effects and offering stereo 3D services required Cinesite to up- grade its existing clustered storage solution. "We were looking for a scalable sys- tem that we could grow with confidence,"Cinesite technical services manager Peter Robertshaw says. The company needed a robust storage solution capable of standing up to the enormous I/O performance and throughput demands placed on it by a staff of over 350 VFX artists that need to concurrently access thousands of files that range from a few kilobytes to hundreds of gigabytes in size. Cinesite was looking for a system that allowed them to better manage data by providing access to multi-tiered data more quickly and efficiently than its ex- isting storage system. And above all, the company needed a storage solution it could count on 24/7 to handle the rigors of production rendering. THE SOLUTION: A Highly Scalable, Reliable Storage Solution. After extensive on-site testing, BlueArc Mercury 100 network attached storage systems were chosen over a number of competing storage solutions. Cinesite found that the Mercury 100s delivered superior performance, reliability, and scala- bility at an attractive price. Cinesite initially deployed two Mercury 100s with 96 gets accessed a lot, or ones which are very randomly accessed, onto our top-tier SAS high-performance drives,"Robertshaw said. "We put other more sequentially accessed files—for example, raw scans that are fed into the pipeline—on our tier-two drives. That means we can align storage tiers with usage patterns. We've also found the BlueArc support staff to be very helpful, and appreciate the sys- tem's redundancy, which eliminates the fear of having a single point of failure. If we lose one Mercury head, we can keep on working often with no disruption." "BlueArc gives us a tiered storage solution that allows us to put a hot file that gets accessed a lot, or ones which are very randomly accessed, onto our top- tier SAS high-performance drives," Robertshaw said. "We put other more se- quentially accessed files—for example, raw scans that are fed into the pipeline—on our tier-two drives. That means we can align storage tiers with usage patterns. We've also found the BlueArc support staff to be very helpful." Peter Robertshaw, Technical Services Manager Internally, Cinesite uses multiple 4Gbps network connections between its BlueArc storage and its renderfarm nodes, which total well over a 6000 CPU cores. It also utilizes a number of 10Gbit connections between the BlueArc and the companies digital review system. Cinesite has for a number of years been using Aspera's patented fasp high- speed transport protocol to move entire movies to its customers over public wide-area networks. For its feature film projects, the company frequently collabo- rates with multiple studios. In those situations, Cinesite relies on Aspera fasp technology to transport individual scenes between production facilities. SUMMARY Cinesite has been delighted with the product that BlueArc has provided. It has evolved quickly and painlessly from its initial deployment to its current size and it has scaled to meet the demands of the significant ramp up in both artist work- station and render core count. for more customer stories, visit www.bluearc.com BlueArc Corporation Corporate Headquarters 50 Rio Robles, San Jose, CA 95134 t 408 576 6600 t 866-864-1040 www.bluearc.com BlueArc UK Ltd. European Headquarters Queensgate House Cookham Road, Bracknell RG12 1RB, United Kingdom t +44 (0) 1344 408 200 f +44 (0) 1344 408 202 ©2011 BlueArc Corporation. All rights reserved. The BlueArc logo is a registered trademark of BlueArc Corporation. 12/10 CS-IMEN-00 Come visit us in booth at CCW NYC 941