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42 cgw s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4 S T O R A G E color grading; network backup is done to LTO-6 tape. Recent projects using the Hitachi NAS include the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta teaser trailer for E3. The Mill teamed with 343 Industries and Microso on the action-packed teaser, which features detailed character animation, clear lighting, and strong rim-lit silhouettes. Also, Mill+, the concept, design, and animation arm of The Mill, worked with a team of designers and VFX artists at The Mill in LA and London to contribute cinematics to Activision's Call of Duty: Ghosts. The highly-stylized look is a hy- brid of live action and CG with contrasting sharp, shard-like shapes for the enemy, and light and smoke elements for the underdog ghosts. Andersson is now demo'ing the Avere FXT Edge Filer 3800 to boost performance. "It sits in front of the Hitachi hardware and acts as a caching server for higher throughput and less stress on the NAS," he explains. According to Andersson, he expects the company to continue with the Hitachi NAS but says it's probably time to step up its capacity. "I wanted a system that you can easily add more storage to," he says. "And the Hitachi NAS is it. I can buy another 20 tb and quickly grow the system as projects get bigger and demand increases." M P C With eight facilities around the world (London, Vancou- ver, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Bangalore, and Amsterdam), the Mov- ing Picture Company (www. moving-picture.com) is striving to "create a global, integrated studio" with similar VFX storage solutions in every facility. "But the reality is that not every studio was built at the same time, so they have slightly different generations of storage technology," says Nick Cannon, director of technology and operations for MPC Film. "But broadly, there's a similar storage architecture for all of them." MPC Film is a longtime EMC Isilon user. "We tend to need very large renderfarms. We need to cope with quite extensive workloads, and not all storage can do that," he notes. "We've used Isilon since 2005 or 2006 because we could easily add more capacity, as it was running with minimal impact to the pro- duction. Other storage systems do that now, but Isilon was one of the first, and we've been very happy with it." For low-performance, high- capacity mass storage with a low cost per terabyte, MPC Film has opted for Supermicro or Dell systems. Long-term archiving is done to LTO (Linear Tape-Open). Recently, MPC Film began adopting accelerators from Avere Systems for its Isilon stor- age so the company can scale up performance and capacity independently. "When you buy Isilon, if you need more capacity, you can add another node," Cannon explains. "Sometimes you just need performance. Avere caches are put in front of the Isilon to buffer it for very heavy renders. In some loca- tions, like London, our render- farms are remote from the main location, so there's some latency. But Avere accelerators speed up things quite dramat- ically. Any new facility with a large renderfarm will have Isilon and Avere moving forward." That's the case with MPC Montreal, which launched nearly a year ago. "The Montreal studio represents our latest genera- tion of storage technology with about 750 tb of Isilon storage and Avere, with backup on Dell disk arrays. The renderfarm is on the premises," Cannon points out. MPC Montreal was the lead VFX studio on X-Men: Days of Future Past. Its storage solutions came into play for building CG assets, animation, rendering, lighting, and compositing. "There's no magic storage configuration that works every time," Cannon notes. "Every shot in every film has a different storage and I/O profile, but we can change the mix of Isilon and Avere to fit the challenges of the day, week, or month." For example, MPC Montreal initially tapped Isilon for its scal- ing capacity and Avere for per- formance, so all the workstation and render traffic went through the Avere cluster. But some shots for the X-Men feature had very large datasets of 5 tb to 10tb. In those instances, "the render would flush the cache in Avere and cause performance problems for the whole studio," Cannon recalls. "So now, certain large datasets go straight to the Isilon cluster." While Cannon is happy with the storage solutions in use, he continues to evaluate the landscape. He adds, "We're at an interesting point in storage technology where we're looking at object storage and how to do global file systems. Require- ments are always evolving, and new companies are coming along that could potentially offer advances in cost, perfor- mance, or features." ยข Christine Bunish is a veteran writer and editor for the film and video indus- try. She can be reached at cbunish@gmail.com. MPC REQUIRES STORAGE THAT CAN HANDLE ITS LARGE WORKLOADS ACROSS TELEVISION AND FILM. A LONGTIME ISILON USER, THE STUDIO BEGAN USING AVERE ACCELERATORS TO SCALE PERFORMANCE.