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 4 1 S T O R A G E upgrading PixStor with new features. This fall, Milk will beta-test Flash acceleration caching designed to increase I/O. "It's claimed to increase performance up to six times," he reports. Milk hasn't seen the benefits of the new Active File Manager (AFM) feature yet but will if the company spawns multiple lo- cations. "Main storage would be kept here and a small storage unit installed in the other build- ing, with AFM caching the two together," Goodbourn explains. "The off-site location would feel as if it were on our network – it's very streamlined." According to Goodbourn, he talks to Pixit Media two or three times a month and finds the company "very forward-think- ing. A lot of things we were talking about have already been implemented." S Y N A P T I C Burbank, California's Synaptic Studios (www.synapticvfx.com) runs a Supermicro 72 tb Win- dows server with a 10-gig fiber connection as its central server for compositing and rendering visual effects. Color-grading suites have their own high-speed direct attached storage. VFX Executive Producer Ste- phen Pugh says the Supermicro system "performs well" and "didn't bog down" when at least 20 artists worked on VFX shots for the first season of the hit Fox series Sleepy Hollow. "Some artists have even commented how much nicer this server is than the one they used at their last place," notes Pugh. A typical workflow at Syn- aptic involves plates delivered on FireWire drives or via Aspera or other file-transfer soware, which are ingested into the server and conformed to the proper directory structure in the database. Shotgun records are created and work assigned to artists. They use JPG proxies for general review and 3D shots, while final composites are completed with DPX frames off the server. Pugh says the Supermicro server was a very cost-effective choice for Synaptic, a studio that was just starting out. "It takes enterprise-class disks for a cost savings, and it's easy to maintain ourselves." Future expansion could mean adding another disk array to the system or using larger capacity drives. But Pugh admits that if circumstances allowed, he'd check out Isilon or HDS storage. "They have a reputation for re- liability and have proven them- selves," he says. "I like that they offer an extra layer of product support behind them – that's not critical, but it's nice." Pugh is not sure what storage will look like in the long term, though. "People are talking about the cloud, but I'm not entirely sold on it from a secu- rity and dependability point of view," he says. "We'll see if I can be convinced." T H E M I L L With facilities in London, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, The Mill (www.themill.com) is known for award-winning moving image, design, and digital projects for the advertis- ing, games, and music indus- tries. The company strives to standardize its storage for visual effects across all locations, and the flagship London facility se- lected BlueArc storage solutions about eight years ago. "I wasn't there for the decision but heard that BlueArc outper- formed the competition," says Mattias Andersson, systems manager at The Mill in LA. "Since then, it has served us very well." Aer BlueArc was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems, the con- figuration at The Mill's LA studio was replaced by a Hitachi NAS 3090-G2, powered by BlueArc. It has approximately 50 tb of fast disk storage and 70tb of slow, or nearline, disk storage. Similar systems are now in place at all The Mill's locations. Andersson says The Mill in LA uses the Hitachi NAS for computer graphics, composit- ing, project files, and renders. All the setup files for the Autodesk Flame are also saved into Hita- chi storage. The storage solution of The Mill in LA needs to offer resil- ience, network performance, ease of management, and the ability to migrate data across fast systems. "We need to be able to work through failures; the Hitachi NAS has dual heads, so it's still fully functional if one goes down," Andersson notes. "Network performance is great too: Each head has two 10 gb Ethernet connections." The company also uses a Rohde & Schwarz DVS Spycer- Box SAN for FilmLight Baselight THE MILL IN LA LOOKS TO A HITACHI NAS SYSTEM POWERED BY BLUEARC TO HANDLE THE LARGE FILES PRODUCED AT THE STUDIO, INCLUDING A HALO 5: GUARDIANS GAME TRAILER FOR E3. "IN THEORY, PIXSTOR IS INFINITELY EXPANDABLE. WE'LL MAX OUT ON POWER AND COOLING BEFORE WE REACH CAPACITY."