ENGINEERING

Dot Hill selected for high-performance storage by international post-production house

Dot Hill Systems' AssuredSAN 3730 arrays have played a key role in the work done by international post-production company Framestore on projects including Lincoln, Sherlock Holmes, Wrath of the Titans, War Horse and the Skyfallmovie titles thanks to the systems’ high performance and reliability. 

Established more than 25 years ago, Framestore has over 600 artists as well as computer scientists, developers and engineers who work together to create impactful imagery for films and advertising campaigns for global high-profile clients including most leading advertising agencies, Hollywood studios, and major household brands.

While delivering Framestore’s largest post-production film project currently scheduled for release in 2013, its Chief Technical Officer Steve MacPherson had to devise a new storage strategy and introduce a new near-line solution to cope with the unprecedented volume of data created over the three-year term of this particular film project. The requirement was for a significant amount of the post-production data to be held live and easily accessible while simultaneously retaining the ability to bring additional, unrelated projects online in parallel.  The volume of data to be kept live was too large for the company’s legacy primary servers and a tape archive could not give required fast data access. After reviewing the options, with the assistance of data storage specialist reseller 101 Data Solutions, MacPherson selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series.

MacPherson said, “Dot Hill has an excellent reputation for engineering and has given considerable thought to performance. Its systems enabled us to re-engineer how we approach nearline and archiving, enabling us to deliver a solution much more flexible and reactive to production requirements. All of this was delivered under the original budget and has been in production without incident from the day it was brought online. Dot Hill and 101 Data Solutions have been excellent partners, and we are very pleased with our choice.”

Initially half a petabyte of nearline storage was introduced using a Fibre Channel infrastructure based on Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3730 arrays populated with 3TB drives. This configuration consisted of two RAID systems each with 288TB of capacity housed in just 16 units of rack space. Now the Dot Hill dual-controller RAID platform provides the storage capacity for all live projects: during production it is the nearline tank holding backups, and while during archiving it is the primary data source with LTO-5 tapes, providing the second level of back-up for added data protection.

MacPherson added, “With the Dot Hill system we can run ZFS on standard NFS servers, giving us the ability to return multi-terabyte scenes to production at much shorter notice. With its greater storage density, we can now also manage our shows during the archiving stage much more efficiently. This has given us a whole new approach to storage and archive management, and we feel far more confident about tertiary storage performance.  As technology has evolved, the growth of data captured on set, as well as raw digital camera output has meant that storage infrastructure planning is a crucial part of every project.  Finding operational efficiencies is critical to success.”

“We continue to expand our portfolio of media and entertainment customers in this important vertical market segment,” said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing at Dot Hill. “Working in close collaboration with our channel partners we’re bringing to market powerful storage solutions at a compelling price. Our storage arrays are ideally suited to handle big data volumes with the flexibility needed by world-leading post production houses such as Framestore.”