Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/256420
10 • Storage Solutions • March 2013 STORAGE SOLUTIONS ARC PRODUCTIONS As a CG animation studio that works on everything from theatrical feature films and TV series to Web series and game cinematics, Toronto's Arc Productions (www. arcproductions.com) deals with "massive amounts of data moving around continuously at a high rate," says VP of infrastructure and training, Terry Dale. "So we need very high-performance storage. We have a very large render- farm in-house, and it makes a lot of demands on our stor- age subsystem." As an example, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, a 75-minute Web series released by Microsoft and 343 Industries, put a heavy load on the system, due to the high complexity of the VFX integration, specifically the creature work the studio was tasked with. In total, the project generated ap- proximately 180,000 hours of render time. Arc Productions has been a BlueArc customer for the last half-dozen years, and has followed the storage solutions to Hitachi Data Systems when that company acquired BlueArc. "Hitachi has one of the best storage subsystems — the hardware and technology the data is stored on — on the market," says Dale. "And BlueArc has one of the best server-head components. So that now gives us the best of both worlds." Arc Productions has been using three BlueArc Titan 3 heads with about 400TB behind them. "As Arc continues to grow, we need to stay one step ahead, and that requires an ongoing evaluation and upgrade of our storage needs," Dale says. That growth is epitomized by both Matt Hat- ter Chronicles for Platinum Films and HiT Entertainment's Thomas & Friends, which generate a heavy load on the system in terms of sheer volume of data that needs to be stored. The two shows have accumulated over 169TB of data combined. Arc Productions is moving to four BlueArc Mercury heads with a new Hitachi disk subsystem underneath. "We'll have the same 400TB to start with but expect to expand well beyond that," Dale reports. "The new equipment will boost our performance, and the newer-generation head has new features and functions so we can be a lot more flexible in the way we deal with data." The new version of Mercury software offers new moni- toring and data management tools, which will enable the studio to "move data quickly, get on and off the system fast and migrate hot data to a lower tier," he says. "When we're heavy into production, our loads are fairly high: We gener- ate and regenerate approximately 1-2TB every other day in the rendering or reiterative process. As shots are com- pleted, the data pool gets more stable, but we need to turn around data very quickly and at a high rate. BlueArc has the only systems that can handle anything we throw at it." SKYWALKER SOUND Lucasfilm's Skywalker Sound (www.skysound.com) in Nicasio, CA, has been using Atto Technology's HBA cards with a Hitachi Data Systems subsystem for at least eight years now. The company's latest acquisition is Atto's Thun- derLink, which enables storage and network connectivity for SAS, SATA, Fibre Channel or Ethernet devices for Thun- derbolt-enabled hosts. "We got ThunderLink for a very unglamorous reason: We needed to build more edit systems and integrate them with our subsystem," says Danny Caccavo, an engi- neer in digital editorial services. "All of our sound editors, mixers and Foley recordists need shared storage with our Pro Tools systems, and since about 2003 it's been done with fibre. Filmmaking is such a cooperative ven- ture; it allows us to load-balance all the work and make efficient use of everyone's time." Shared storage also enhances creativity. "If someone is pre-mixing dialogue or sound effects and the background has already been cut, it allows them to hear the context of Arc Productions uses BlueArc solutions for projects like Matt Hatter Chronicles for Platinum Films. Terry Dale is inset. Storage Supplement 2013RAV10FINAL READ.indd 10 2/28/13 10:33 AM