Media and Entertainment

Media and Entertainment is a growing, multi-billion dollar industry driven by innovative companies whose artistic visions demand new ways to create, edit, share, archive, deliver, and manage digital media and content.

Just a decade ago, animation studios were satisfied with releasing an animated film every 24 months or so; now consumers demand more. With IBRIX, studios have been able to reduce their per-picture production time to 12-16 months even as the average number of render hours has climbed from 5 million less than 10 years ago to beyond 30 million for today’s blockbusters.

Challenges

• Render farms are made up of thousands of compute nodes which process an average of 175,000 frames in a feature-length film. With hundreds of millions of small files simultaneously in play, traditional file serving from multiple storage “silos” makes sharing and accessing files difficult. Funneling I/O through monolithic single filers creates bottlenecks—as a result, the multi-million dollar render farm sits idle waiting to access files.

• To parlay flashes of inspiration into new assets and ultimately revenue, artists need rapid access to the entire array of digital assets that their organization (and even subsidiaries and affiliates) have ever owned. Likewise, older assets are also needed for post-processing and for transcoding to multiple formats for distribution. Keeping these massive archives online is expensive to store and to manage.

IBRIX Fusion is ideally suited for the intensive processing requirements and demanding workloads that advanced applications require. Its unsurpassed support of high transaction rates can open the I/O floodgates, allowing processors to be fully utilized on production work and accelerating the content pipeline. Its flexible architecture enables IT to easily build large repositories by adding capacity and components on demand without outages. Open and modular in nature, IBRIX Fusion can be scaled for any size installation to maximize return on workstation and render farm investments and ensure on-time project completion.

 In the early stages of our film, it was taking 10 times longer to render each frame because the NFS caches could not go fast enough to serve up the data needed. Having IBRIX in our network allowed us to get the film done on time—extremely important when you consider the billions in revenue that’s at stake from box office receipts and consumer spending on film-related
merchandise.
Vice President of Technology
Pixar Animation Studios

IBRIX Fusion software enables fast, scalable access to data in real-time so Media and Entertainment companies can:

• Increase rendering performance up to 50 times
• Maximize utilization of rendering and storage hardware
• Create a scalable digital asset online archive at low, single-digit cost per gigabyte
• Simplify management while maximizing flexibility
• Scale storage capacity and performance as needs grow, without forklift upgrades and downtime