Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/398245
s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4 c g w 3 9 S T O R A G E FX and animation studios re- quire robust, reliable, and fast storage solutions – systems they can depend on to get the job done while artists work their magic with little or no thought to what's happening in the back- ground. The marketplace offers more storage options than ever before, and studios are choosing from a wide range of hardware and soware to meet their needs today – and tomorrow. T O O N B O X Toronto 3D animation studio ToonBox Entertainment (www. toonboxent.com) has seen ex- plosive growth since it opened six years ago with 10 employees. With the studio's animated feature The Nut Job, released earlier this year, and The Nut Job 2 and Spark features now in production, ToonBox is pre- paring its staff of approximately 200 for the company's second move to larger quarters. Storage needs have grown quickly, too. ToonBox's original 150 tb BlueArc system experi- enced performance challenges during the production of The Nut Job, which required greater efficiencies in the workflow. BlueArc was merging with Hi- tachi Data Systems at the time (it has since become HDS), and Greg Whynott, manager of systems and IT at ToonBox, considered both adding more spindles to the existing system or migrating to another storage solution, like Isilon or NetApp. Then another possible solu- tion presented itself. "Our desk- top vendor is Dell; they went into partnership with Nexenta, which has a hardware-agnostic, soware storage solution. I'm a longtime advocate of open- source solutions; our purse strings were pretty tight at the time, and Dell approached us with a great deal, so we went with them," Whynott explains. Whynott admits that with ToonBox working on the final stages of The Nut Job, the high-pressure environment put a lot of demand on the new system. "Everything eventual- ly worked out, but there had been some shipping problems regarding parts [in order] to deliver the performance we required," says Whynott. "The render jobs on the HPC (High Performance Computer) took a long time, artists were frustrat- ed with slow loading of scene files and assets, and review stations struggled to maintain frame rates. Many times we had well over 5,000 simultaneous requests to the storage server in a very short period of time." Whynott had used Avere Systems clusters before and discovered that the company had several demo units nearby. He shut down ToonBox's file server at lunchtime and quickly installed a pair of Avere FXT Series Edge filers to speed workflow performance and en- able fast, cost-effective scaling. "An hour or two later, people were coming to my door saying, 'Whatever you did, everything's beautiful now,'" he recalls. With its workload diminished, the file server gained "lots of breathing room." Desktop users continued to hit file server storage directly, while the HPC accessed the storage servers via the Avere cluster. This provided more resources on the storage system, which were used to quickly service the interactive IN JUST SIX YEARS, TOONBOX HAS GROWN, WITH ONE FEATURE FILM, THE NUT JOB, RELEASED AND TWO OTHERS IN PRODUCTION, AND HAS CALLED ON AVERE TO HELP WITH ITS GROWING NEEDS. V