Post Magazine

7 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2018 STORAGE SOLUTIONS standing of how our stor- age is delivered is no longer mandatory to communicate requirements and predic- tions." Essential to Framestore's system is "a high level of redundancy within each individual Hot server zone — power supplies, controllers, RAID striping, et cetera," he notes. "In order to protect against catastrophic zone failure, each zone exists in a matched set where the alternative can assume duties should an individ- ual zone server become unavailable. "In the event of storage array failure, we also main- tain a spare zone that can be repopulated from cold storage," MacPherson says. "The critical factor here is TTR (Time To Recovery) and the time it takes to repopulate. We have two general categories of a Hot data — 'keep,' which is data where we keep two copies at all times and 'churn,' which is data where the effort required to backup and maintain that data exceeds the effort to recreate it from source materials." Cold storage is simply high-capacity disks designed to maintain a second copy of all 'keep' data. As data is removed from Hot, a second copy is created and kept in Frozen storage. Upon completion, the show is cleaned by pipeline rulesets, archived to LTO tape and ultimately stored in a physically secure environment. Framestore's storage architecture enables the company "to wrest ourselves from letting others determine our choices, from the limitations and cost associated with a specific vendor's approach," says MacPherson. "This is in no way intended to be critical of vendors: There are many outstanding solutions that solve well-understood problems, and we have deployed them with great success in the past. What we saw was an opportunity to build something that could scale easily in accordance and tightly coupled to the way our productions work. By being soft- ware-defined, we are also ready to leverage new storage technologies as they become available." It's necessary for Framestore to "accommodate the requirements of multiple, large studio projects without disruption," he notes. "As we scale both our internal data centers and also our ability to exploit cloud-based options, we realized that investing in R&D liberated us from the general purpose software requirements of the industry. Instead of implementing solutions that partially address key fundamentals, we could deliver a set of services closely aligned to the business and production requirements of Framestore." Paddington 2 Thor: Ragnarok The Framestore studio space. MacPherson

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