Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/348146
www.postmagazine.com 32 POST JULY 2014 STORAGE FOR VISUAL EFFECTS growing to half a petabyte. "The Avere FXT cluster separates storage performance from capacity, optimizing response time to artists and our render farm," says Day. "The Isilon provides robust and scalable storage capacity at a cost-eff ective price." Rising Sun Pictures has had this tiered storage solution in production for three years and plans to scale up both as pro- duction demand and complexity increase. "That's the simplicity of these solutions," Day points out. "New nodes are added to either performance or storage clusters in minutes, and the [clusters] rebalance the data behind the scenes." In selecting the Avere and Isilon solu- tions, reliability was key. "It's extremely important when considering deadlines for projects and huge demands on the fi le system," he notes. Minimizing produc- tion downtime was essential. "We also needed the ability to scale with a minimum of hassle," says Day. The systems give Rising Sun Pictures the ability to "bolt on additional hardware in minutes. And maintenance is a breeze — you can take one or more nodes offl ine and not disrupt production." These two solutions form the back- bone for storing VFX information from every department, from live-action plates turned over by clients through set-up fi les saved by the artists. "For the Quicksilver Pentagon Kitchen sequence on X-Men: Days of Future Past, our look development and eff ects artists were rendering stereo images for deep com- positing that stored color and depth in- formation for every pixel in the scene for all the CG elements — this involved the creation of a lot of data, in addition to the simulation and caching that allowed us to create thousands of water drop- lets, hundreds of props and additional eff ects," Day explains. Rising Sun Pictures has additional storage requirements for high-perfor- mance databases, home directories and supporting the business environment. The company employs a disk-to-disk-to- tape strategy, so it's extremely quick to pull a fi le from back up in minutes, says Day. "We can produce terabytes of data per hour, so you need a strategy to move 'cold data' offl ine. Online storage is not endless, and we have built strategies to achieve this." He notes that, "all produc- tion data gets written to tape in dupli- cate. Tapes are still cheap and capacity is increasing every year. Tape is a tried and tested technology; we can have confi - dence that all data can be restored from tapes within hours and have integrated systems into our production environment leveraging this functionality." Looking ahead, Day says Amazon Web Services Glacier is "exciting, as is the pricing model. 'Cold' storage like Glacier is defi nitely something we are following. Watch this space!" He adds, "As the price of fl ash drops, new and exciting prod- ucts are entering the market, [such as] PureStorage, Nimble and Panzura either utilizing all fl ash or hybrids hooked into cloud storage. It's an exciting time with new storage startups all vying for our storage dollar. The competition is healthy and pushes everyone to innovate." Rising Sun Pictures delivers complex VFX for features like X-Men: Days of Future Past, using an Avere Systems FXT3200 Edge Filer. Recent projects at The Mill using the Hitachi NAS include the Halo 5: Guardians Multi- player Beta teaser trailer for E3 (Halo 4 pictured below).