Post Magazine

August 2018

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www.postmagazine.com 31 POST AUGUST 2018 STORAGE NEWS Whether it's VFX, VR or AR, creating immersive content requires a flexible, high-performance storage infrastructure. Enable your creative group to make amazing content by providing scale-out storage that easily scales capacity and throughput to meet any workflow requirements. Accelerate your production and rendering projects with Panasas ® ActiveStor ® . Your Reality — Our Storage www.panasas.com Future Ready Starts Now. WHY GOOD STORAGE IS IMPORTANT FOR VFX The visual effects market has been increasing at an astounding rate over recent years. Fuelled by an increase in targeted broadcast, availability of low cost internet access, and penetration of mobile devices, according to Research and Markets (www.researchandmarkets.com), the animation, VFX and gaming market is projected to reach US $270 billion by 2020. While that is obviously all great news for everyone in the VFX industry, the rising tide of assets is leading to a storage challenge for many. This increase in demand means that VFX artists are creating more content than ever before. Also these are data-hungry files that use up a lot of space. At the same time, with so much content being created, VFX artists can often monetise or re-use previously created animations. The reaction to the growing archive is often to just whack on a bit more storage to deal with more capacity. However, adding on extra storage capacity generally leaves you with storage silos, essentially lots of separate pots that are not interconnected. Every time you want to find a piece of content, you have to first try and remember which silo you stored it in, then you need to wade through it to find the specific item. With so much content and everything stored in silos, how do you find what you are looking for? By implementing a media focused private cloud and object storage platform, VFX companies can revolutionize their infrastructure. These solutions are much more integrated, so you can add as many nodes as you like while keeping ev- erything searchable from a single interface. That means you no longer have silos of storage where you need to know exactly where something is stored before you can find it. Metadata tagging makes content much more discoverable too, rather than needing to know the file name or date something was created, you can search based on a number of different parameters. In the case of our solu- tion, MatrixStore, we have added Artificial Intelligence support, meaning that items can be automatically tagged based on specific content. The right storage solution can also greatly increase efficiency. Automated workflows mean you can set rules for when an item should be moved to ar- chive, restored, etc. Many companies are also looking for hybrid cloud work- flows where some items will be stored in the public cloud and some in the private cloud and moved between the two when required. This has obvious advantages for keeping egress costs to a minimum while enabling global col- laboration on projects. —By Nick Pearce-Tomenius, sales & marketing director, Object Matrix Targeted broadcast is helping fuel an increase in VFX demands.

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