Post Magazine

6 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2018 STORAGE SOLUTIONS FRAMESTORE: AN APPETITE FOR STORAGE BY CHRISTINE BUNISH The VFX department of Framestore's UK film divi- sion (www.framestore.com), whose recent credits include Warner Bros' Paddington 2, Blade Runner 2049, Disney's Beauty and the Beast and Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, has what CTO Steve MacPherson calls "a voracious appetite for production storage." Framestore is challenged to "balance the pro- duction requirements of multiple large, Hollywood tentpole movies at various stages of delivery against the commercial requirements of efficiency, the artists' requirements for interactive performance and the Denial of Service attack that is Framestore's on-premise and cloud-based rendering," he says. So "accommodating scale, production fluctuations and hostile performance requirements across many petabytes of high-performance storage required a bit of thought." After a period of analysis and discovery, a formal storage architecture was proposed and adopted. Over the past 18 months the technology team at Framestore has phased it in with great success, MacPherson reports. Utilizing enterprise-grade commodity hardware, Framestore runs proprietary software designed in conjunction with its systems, systems development and pipeline teams to deliver a high degree of per- formance predictability and availability. Using a combination of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Near Line SAS (NLSAS) disks running on the ZFS file system, each cluster is configured in High Availabil- ity (HA) failover pairs. The studio is experimenting with different operating systems for the head; Solaris is the current default, although Framestore is also exploring Linux and FreeBSD as a foundation for next-genera- tion file severs. "Framestore maintains a high commit- ment to software development and is currently deep within the NFS code looking to further extend server functionality," MacPherson says. Framestore partitions its storage into three prima- ry categories: Hot, Cold and Frozen. The Hot zone is based primarily on fast SAS/SSD and is dedicated to active production where "multiple artists, multi- ple departments and multiple sites can work on the same shot simultaneously sharing work and pro- gressing through that work, together or separately, maintaining both a high degree of visibility and creative autonomy," he explains. Framestore's in-house tools perform scene assem- bly and versioning for the artists and work in concert with the underlying hardware systems. "This makes it easy for artists to locate, load and begin work on the shots/sequences they are assigned," he says. "The Hot, Cold and Frozen components that lie beneath pro- vide a common set of methods for the technical and production departments to discuss provisioning and deployment of the storage infrastructure. Artists may or may not be interested in the mechanics of how this is architected, the key point being that a deep under- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Beauty & The Beast

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