FM – (Media) Post Production – IOPstor centralises media application

Background
FM is a post production house editing videos, 3DFX, etc. for finally cutting the movies which go for launches. They have 40 workstations which work on different applications like Nuke , Maya , 3Dmax and Afterdeck . The were currently working off workstations and then exchanging files while transferring then on the network which caused a lot of bandwidth clogging and confusion amongst the team members due to different files versions. They needed a central storage which could handle 40 users working of the storage solution centrally without any bandwidth issues. This would save them local storage space on machines while maintaining data integrity. Since data is centralised their would be less load on the network as there would be no file transfers between users.Most important was data reliability and security where redundancy and rights for user management were required. They wanted a storage which could scale in capacity while still give performance. They wanted to use the storage solution for rendering over the network for certain users.

Solution
IOPstor’s 24 bay hybrid solution was deployed within a week with 48TB RAW capacity and expandable up to 240TB. Due to the large bandwidth required for rendering of the storage solution IOPStor built in 4 10G NIC’s as the network backend. Separate read (L2arc) and write (Zil) SSD caching was provided.

Results
They started of with 10 users accessing the centralised storage where they had moved all the data for access. Over 2 weeks they moved all 40 users to the centralised IOPStor storage solution for reading, writing and rendering data