Motek Entertainment Selects NexentaStor

Nexenta Systems, Inc., developer of NexentaStor, an open storage solution based upon the revolutionary file system ZFS, announced that Motek Entertainment, an Amsterdam-based animation, motion capture and production studio, has selected the NexentaStor open storage software appliance to allow multiple creative users to share and view both uncompressed Standard Definition (SD) and uncompressed High Definition (HD)video content over standard Gigabit Ethernet networking.

Motek Entertainment’s deployment of NexentaStor supports HD and lower resolution SD non-linear video applications, render farm file pools, and global command and control applications. The system is platform and application agnostic, supporting Windows and Mac via CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFS, FTP and HTTP protocols. NexentaStor provides storage virtualization and NFS/CIFS gateway functionality to iSCSI storage target systems.

A case study and reference architecture based on the experience of Motek Entertainment and others is now available on the Nexenta website and through Nexenta partners world-wide.

"At Motek Entertainment, we provide cutting edge production work for features, commercials, television, video games, online and mobile media," said Nathan Ornick, Studio Manager, Motek Entertainment. "NexentaStor delivers the ideal balance of performance, scalability, and cost-of-ownership for digital media applications, and by switching to NexentaStor’s unique ZFS-based architecture, we’ve seen time savings for our storage administration and, more importantly, limitless and instant backups for our designs."

The storage virtualization architecture used by Motek is also being used to support a range of performance-sensitive applications including graphics research at Stanford University and others of the over 3300 NexentaStor users. As discussed in the ‘Motek, Nexenta, and NAS with iSCSI best practices‘ case study available on the Nexenta site, Nexenta uses the ZFS virtual block devices called ZVOLs to provide a level of abstraction on top of the individual iSCSI servers. The use of ZVOLs allows NexentaStor to deliver native thin provisioning, improved performance, and enterprise class data integrity despite the use of inexpensive disks as storage. The ZVOLs are then accessed as files by Autodesk and Adobe applications.

"We are very happy to highlight the positive experience of Motek Entertainment in using NexentaStor in front of iSCSI for improved performance and manageability," Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta said. "We’re seeing more and more users that like the cost savings of iSCSI but want the enhanced performance and the advanced data integrity capabilities of NexentaStor. As SATA disks can suffer from silent data corruption, the unique ability of ZFS’s end to end check-sums to catch this corruption is especially important for firms like Motek who rely upon accurate data for their success."