Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/57245
STORAGE SOLUTIONS (www.fotokem.com), six Isilon IQ 6000x clustered storage systems are distributed in machine rooms around the facil- ity where they facilitate "everything you need NAS to do for DI work," says senior VP/GM Bill Schultz. The NAS systems support at least 12 lower-bandwidth I/O machines, including Arri scanners and laser recorders for 35mm work, a super high-resolution scanner for 65mm, and 5-, 8- and 15-perf film recorders. Multiple high-bandwidth Quantel Pablo systems are connected to its shared storage as are The Foundry's Nuke and Ocula renderfarms, Clipsters and the company's own NextLAB systems. Schultz says FotoKem has been a longtime Isilon custom- He gives kudos to the ability to have a single namespace for arbitrarily large partitions. "It's nice to have a single namespace of 90TB, and we have three of them." Schultz notes that FotoKem's Keep Me Posted facility, about two miles away, has a 10GB dark fibre link to his di- vision that enables them to pass work back and forth and share the Isilon storage. The company's San Francisco-based Spy also has 9000i clusters with Accelerator X-series nodes. He says FotoKem Burbank expects to move to new Isilon products later this year since the 6000x clusters are no lon- ger being manufactured. "We expect new Isilon products to give us even better performance," he predicts. A FotoKem DI suite: they use Isilon clustered storage for this type of work. er starting with 20TB of storage. "These 6000xs represent about 450TBs," he reports. "They have never failed us and have throughput like nothing I've seen before. They can sus- tain the aggregate throughputs of 740MB/s for long periods with 1GB nodes on the renderfarm. We have 10GB Accelera- tors to take advantage of the speed of the Pablos and Clip- sters, which achieve and sustain 240MB/s over a single link." He expects to keep the 6000xs online for another three or four years before migrating them to nearline storage where they will continue to remain useful "for a long time. We've never lost a byte of data, and the downtime has been virtu- ally non-existent." The Isilon architecture permits users to independently scale performance versus storage size, he explains. "We can add more storage without buying additional network inter- faces, a combination of storage with network interface or an Accelerator with network interface only." Schultz also likes that the 6000xs are "OS agnostic — they work with everything at a very high rate of speed: Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac. We have all flavors here — a Mac render farm, Windows-based Pablos, Linux-based Nuke rendering. All of them connect easily to the Isilons." 10 • Storage Solutions • March 2012 ORIGINAL MEDIA With offices in New York City and Los Angeles, 10-year- old Original Media (www.originalmedia.com) specializes in unscripted television and films from development through post production. The company started with the Miami Ink and LA Ink tattoo-themed series and now has New York Ink running on TLC. It also produces Swamp People and the new Mud Cats on The History Channel, The Rachael Zoe Project on Bravo, the tattoo competition Ink Master on Spike, Dual Sur- vival and Storm Chasers on Discovery, the new Being Johnny Weir on Logo, King of Dirt on DIY, Barbecue Masters on TLC, and the new Comic Book Men, about film director Kevin Smith's comic book shop, on AMC. With such a full slate of shows, no wonder the company acquired Avid's ISIS 5000 realtime shared media storage sys- tem at the end of last year. A second system was just in- stalled in LA to usher in post production capabilities at that office; its first series will be LA Style on Oxygen. "We have 18 Avid Nitris systems, 12 Avid Adrenalines and another 20 Avid Media Composer software-only sys- tems in New York," says VP of post production Chelsey Trowbridge. "We had two LAN shares and an Avid Unity