Fix Studio in Paris Accelerates 3D and 4K Rendering

Fix Studio SAS is a VFX/media entertainment production company based in Paris, specialized in HD, 3D and 4K video advertising and documentary productions.

The ability to manipulate large data sets and share them across scores of machines and production specialists is critical to meeting project schedules. As production media evolves from HD to 3D and 4K formats, there is four times as much data that needs to be processed and shared without bottlenecks, increasing the urgency for efficient storage systems.

Before 2014 Fix had been relying on an expensive, proprietary NAS solution to store and share the large data files needed for Video post-production work. A 240TB NAS system was connected to and supported a render farm, which was expanding from under 100 artist workstations to over 180 machines.

While the NAS system was good at providing NFS network access, the IO/s performance was unacceptably low (~12K) and whenever a new rendering project was launched the server would stall. With up to 20 rendering jobs needing to be kicked off per day, and dozens of machines trying to load images at the same time whenever a new batch render project is being launched, the proprietary, expensive NAS system could not handle the existing workload and could stall several times per day. At the same time Fix forecasted that the problem only was going to worsen due to their industry moving to richer file formats (3D, 4K) and the growing number of machines in the render farm.

Fix had been discussing their technical challenges and requirements with APY Micro Sarl, a solution provider to the France-Benelux market specializing in architecting and supplying systems for the Video/3D markets. APY recommended Fix Studio to adopt standard, economical Linux-based NAS storage server systems with mixed SSD and HDD storage to address Fix’s growing capacity and performance requirements, leveraging the tiering capabilities of FuzeDrive Server software from Enmotus, Inc. to achieve the performance during rendering and prepare for the increasing number of 3D and 4K projects, while also manage and optimize expenditures on growing amounts of storage media.

With their APYBrick systems (5U; supporting 24 HDD + 8 SSD; Linux Ubuntu or CentOS) featuring FuzeDrive server tiering software, Fix is able to support over 180 rendering farm machines including running 3D and 4K workloads and handles their IO/s requirements. The stalling problem, or storage server performance bottleneck, has gone away for good. Fix had looked at alternatives including traditional native Linux SSD caching software, ZFS, and other proprietary storage systems, but found APYBrick with FuzeDrive is the solution that could meet their needs. FuzeDrive also helps future proof storage systems for Fix with its ability to accommodate and tier upcoming classes of storage such as PCIe SSD and NVMe SSD.

FuzeDrive performs block-level tiering in real time for the up to 20 rendering jobs kicked off daily at Fix, unlike the ‘old school’ once per day or once per week tiering functionality found in proprietary and native Linux tiering solutions, which is not acceptable. Also, the ability to ‘pin’ active files or sub-files to the fast media with FuzeDrive is a real boon for renderers.

Overall, FuzeDrive addresses Fix’s need for higher performance for projects, which are proliferating in number, and the need to base it all on Linux and not proprietary expensive systems.

“Your FuzeDrive software product is the only one that does a truly great job of tiering data in Linux, which is the standard OS for video post-production. The product name ‘micro tiering’ caught our attention immediately and it was the right time as we desperately needed something to allow us to tier larger data capacities in Linux, which apparently only FuzeDrive can do,” said Maxim Doucet, CIO, Fix Studio.