Maximum Throughput, Inc. announced that Jock Animation (Pty) Ltd., in Johannesburg, South Africa, selected its Sledgehammer NAS (Network Attached Storage) system to support their work on a full-length animated feature film currently in production.

To handle the animation’s production at the resolution and frame rate of 1080/50p, Jock’s facility relies at present on a 120-processor PC render farm, 15 Autodesk Maya seats, and two visual effects compositing suites -- all connected via a Gigabit Ethernet network. Jock anticipates expanding its facility to 25 Maya seats and a 280-processor render farm. Since the 1080/50p files are 8bit RGB files, rich with sophisticated imagery and effects, rendering often requires eight or more passes to accomplish, which increases the workload exponentially.

While Jock Animation first began work on the animated feature using a makeshift NAS, it quickly became apparent that the storage device was not up to the challenge of this demanding project because rendering jobs took an inordinate amount of time and brought network traffic between the NAS and render farm to a crawl. Jock animators were prone to extended periods of 'hibernation' during rendering sessions as access to the shared storage almost came to a halt.

Since installing Maximum Throughput’s Sledgehammer NAS, Jock’s animators are thrilled with the increase in performance and productivity. “The pipeline is now working effectively,” said Martin Heigan, technical supervisor for Jock Animation. “The Sledgehammer has eliminated long periods of waiting. We’re impressed with how this NAS intelligently manages the available bandwidth on our network.”

The Sledgehammer NAS was specifically designed to support access to heavy data loads by multiple clients on a network and to handle network-heavy operations without performance degradation. “The performance is great. With Sledgehammer, our workflow has improved by about 70-percent,” said Braam Smit, Jock’s IT manager. “We used to wait three to five minutes for a heavy scene to open. Now it opens in under a minute.”

After comparing Sledgehammer to other leading NAS systems on the market, Jock Animation determined that the price was particularly attractive in light of the system’s 6 TBs of storage, features and performance, and believed strongly that their increased productivity would lead to a more rapid return on investment.

Jock’s Heigan said, “Sledgehammer gives us exactly what we need—fast transfer speeds, a large storage capacity, and a powerful solution that’s easy to manage.”

The Sledgehammer sale and installation has been worked out in conjunction with Touchvision, Maximum Throughput premier reseller and partner in South Africa.