Intelligent Creatures Acquires Isilon IQ System

At SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles, Isilon Systems announced that Intelligent Creatures, a visual effects company that has worked on a number of major Hollywood films including Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Babel, The Game Plan and currently in production on The Watchmen is using Isilon IQ clustered storage to power its entire post-production workflow, including 2D compositing and 3D animation. Using Isilon clustered storage, Intelligent Creatures is able to streamline its rendering and asset management operations, significantly increasing data access and network performance to speed project turnaround. In addition, Isilon IQ’s single point of management and ease of use have enabled Intelligent Creatures to take on larger and more complex projects without adding additional staff or increasing the size of its render farm.

"Intelligent Creatures is focused on delivering the most progressive visual effects in the industry, enabling our Hollywood clients to tell their stories in the most compelling, visually rich manner possible," said Michael Hatton, CTO, Intelligent Creatures. "As demand grows, our work is increasingly more data-intensive and time-sensitive, requiring a storage solution with the performance and ease of management necessary to accelerate our operations without increasing costs. Isilon’s clustered storage system delivered on all fronts."

In order to continuously deliver the most immersive visual experiences for Hollywood studios with demanding schedules, Intelligent Creatures utilizes a render farm of more than 300 processors running a variety of high performance, data-intensive visual effects applications. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Intelligent Creatures traditional storage system was significantly less capable of delivering the high concurrent throughput necessary to support the around-the-clock work of its artists, hindering productivity and slowing project turnaround. By deploying Isilon clustered storage, Intelligent Creatures is now able to scale performance linearly or independently with minimal downtime and workflow interruption, providing its operations with both the high performance and simplicity necessary to power its workflow. Additionally, Isilon’s unique ‘pay as you grow’ architecture and reliable, immediate data access have enabled Intelligent Creatures to take on larger, more intense projects without increasing the size of its render farm or artist staff, dramatically reducing cost and resource expenditure.

"As audiences continue to demand more realism and visual impact from motion pictures, progressive visual effects companies are a critical component in enabling Hollywood studios to meet this demand with each new release," said Steve Fitz, Senior Vice President of Global Field Operations, Isilon Systems. "Intelligent Creatures is at the leading edge of visual effects studios delivering exactly the experience consumers want — and Hollywood needs — to keep audiences coming back for years to come."

Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ delivers the industry’s first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon’s award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems, including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ, and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.