Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/714180
STORAGE FOR VFX www.postmagazine.com 25 POST AUGUST 2016 last year," Trojan explains. "We've been extremely happy with the Oracle. It's very user-friendly and very fl exible in how you set it up, manage it and connect to artists in diff erent rooms." Alkemy X has 10-gig fi ber and 10-gig Ethernet feeds to review rooms and 1-gig E to workstations. The New York offi ce maintains its TerraBlock for broadcast storage as an alternative to the ISIS system. "We were able to expand the existing broadcast infrastructure in New York to a total of 60TBs by repurposing what the Oracle system replaced," says Trojan. Alkemy X is the primary VFX house on Season 3 of Power, which is shot in New York and airs on Starz. A 4K project, Power has extensive VFX needs, including set extensions and environments, seasonal ad- justments, and blood and muzzle fl ashes. While the new Oracle ZFS has given the company "the fl exibility to address the diff erent needs of the work that comes through," Alkemy X keeps its "ear to the ground" to track storage developments in a fast-changing industry. "It seems like the sky's the limit," Trojan says. "Shooting 6K and 8K is increasing, there are new color gamuts, HDR, more Virtual Reality. Delivering in 4K and HDR is becoming a reality in the day-to-day world. The marketplace off ers a plethora of storage solutions, and it will continue to evolve to meet our changing demands." ATOMIC FICTION Atomic Fiction (www.atomicfi ction.com) launched in Oakland, CA, then expand- ed to Montreal in 2014 where a second expansion is underway. Recent feature fi lm credits for the VFX studio include 465 shots for Star Trek: Beyond, 250 shots for Deadpool and 270 shots for The Walk, the story of Philippe Petit's incredible 1974 wirewalking feat between the World Trade Center towers. "Pretty much every project involves both studios in some way," notes head of systems, Shawn Wallbridge. "Everyone in each offi ce works off a Qumulo platform with an Avere Edge Filer in front of each cluster and Aspera to send fi les between the two sites." The Montreal studio originally had a 14-node Qumulo QC24 cluster with 158TBs of storage. As part of the recent expansion it was replaced with a four- node Qumulo QC208 hybrid storage appliance with 534TB capacity. Montreal's 14-node QC24 will be sent to Oakland, where it will be added to the existing 10-node QC24, boosting storage there to over 400TBs. "We knew Montreal needed more space and planned to buy more QC24 nodes," says Wallbridge. "But Qumulo thought we'd be better off going with a QC208. We needed to upgrade Oakland anyway, so our QC24 could go there adding nodes to their cluster and magically giving them plenty more space for a while." Atomic also bolstered its switching environment and network on both sides of the continent, moving from 10-gig to 40-gig Arista switches for faster access to storage. Upgrading to the QC208 gave Atomic the perfect opportunity to mi- grate to Qumulo's new Erasure Coding (EC) data protection, which gives them 30 percent more usable space and off ers faster performance. The Qumulo systems are all hybrid, Wallbridge notes: the QC24s have 1.6TBs of SSD storage and the new QC208 Alkemy X handles VFX for Starz's Power (above). Atomic Fiction (left) completed Star Trek: Beyond. Atomic Fiction completed 270 shots for The Walk. © 2015 TRISTAR PICTURES © 2015 TRISTAR PICTURES