INDUSTRY

Happy Feet Penguins Can Dance and Dance and Dance Thanks to Network Appliance Storage Solutions and Animal Logic: Network Appliance today announced that Animal Logic, the animation and visual effects company behind the hit movie Happy Feet, relied on NetApp storage and data management solutions to store, manage, protect, and access data while making the animated film. Animal Logic created a fully animated movie with remarkable visuals and effects that required simplified storage architecture with consistently high performance and scalability. Animal Logic used NetApp fabric-attached storage (FAS) systems holding over 300TB of data in a mix of primary and secondary storage for archiving. The NetApp solution provided the production house with high-performance, reliable, and cost-effective storage to accelerate the delivery of its digital effects. Backed by the high performance and robust nature of NetApp storage systems, Animal Logic has continued to push the boundaries of computer-generated animation in movies like The Matrix Reloaded, Lord of the Rings, and Moulin Rouge. Over time, animation has evolved from an entertainment alternative produced primarily for children to an industry targeting a much broader audience. As the animation industry grows, digital production houses look to technological improvements to help meet the increasing demands. For production houses like Animal Logic, success would be far more difficult without a highly responsive and consistently available storage network and software applications that can adapt to greater demands. Industry specialists consider animation to be among the most demanding applications for storage system in terms of performance, with thousands of concurrent processors accessing and storing data at any point in time. The success of Animal Logic and its resulting dramatic growth have led to the creation of hundreds of terabytes of data that needs to be stored, managed, and easily accessible. Xavier Desdoights, director of Technical Operations at Animal Logic, says, “Audiences expect us to deliver breakthrough visual effects and animation, and as such, our films are incredibly complex to create. In the animation business, with its short delivery lead times, it’s absolutely vital that data is readily accessible. We continue to use NetApp because it can handle the highly intensive technical applications required to create animation such as Happy Feet. “NetApp offers a reliable and simple management interface, and they understand the postproduction sector and its tight deadlines. Providing around-the-clock support, as well as reliability and scalability, are important factors for us, and NetApp delivers consistently.” Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp, says, “Animal Logic’s creative team can’t have their time and creative energy hampered by dealing with performance, management, or scalability issues. NetApp is trusted in the animation and rich media industry because of the simplicity, performance, and reliability our storage solutions provide.”