Rainmaker Entertainment and Zoic Studios Turn to Ocarina

Ocarina Networks announced that Rainmaker Entertainment and Zoic Studios are the latest customers in the CG animation, post-production and visual effects (VFX) industry to implement its ECOsystem solution to achieve up to 80% reductions in their primary storage footprint.

The media and entertainment industry is experiencing up to 50% data growth per year, driven by the adoption of all-digital HD and film workflows and the move to 3D production. At the same time, there is a growing demand for online archival storage in response to constant repurposing of media assets.

Using Ocarina, Rainmaker and Zoic join other leading media and entertainment companies that have tapped the technology to cost-effectively deduplicate and compress their multi-tier storage systems, keeping more data online longer and creating new efficiencies in artist and animator workflow. By dramatically optimizing storage, the companies also save on data center space, power, and cooling for each production or media archive.

"The uptake in interest in Ocarina in the media and entertainment space has been dramatic and a real validation of the work we put into supporting post-production data sets. In the last month, we’ve started more evaluations, benchmarks and data quality tests in studios and post-production houses than we have in the last six months. Our wins at Rainmaker and Zoic confirm that we’re solving real technology challenges in this market," said Dave Withers, vice president of business development at Ocarina Networks.

Production data from existing Ocarina customers indicates that capital expense for new storage may drop 70% per production, even when the data is media file types that are already compressed, and reduce the overall cost of storage by as much as 80%. Ocarina’s solution combines object deduplication with an industry-specific set of compression algorithms that can quickly and losslessly shrink key post-production file types.

Rainmaker and Zoic: Animated about Storage Optimization
Industry leading computer graphics animation house Rainmaker Entertainment has achieved a 65% capacity savings by deploying Ocarina ECOsystem. With 70 terabytes of live data, growing at 25 terabytes per year, in addition to many terabytes of archival data, Rainmaker needed to keep more data online for continued use and reference but simply did not have the necessary capacity. By leveraging the Ocarina content-aware storage optimization technology, the animation house now keeps all relevant data online and accessible to artists and production crews at all times. Instead of requiring IT to get involved in data retrieval from tape, resulting in long wait times and reduced productivity, artists can now search for and access the data in a real-time, self-service capacity.

Award winning digital studio, Zoic Studios was similarly inundated with data that they needed to keep accessible for artists. After comparing Ocarina to several other solutions, Zoic ultimately selected Ocarina for its easy and seamless integration with existing storage systems, in addition to the ease-of-use for the end-user. By deploying Ocarina they were able to reduce data by up to 70%, and increase online storage from six months to two years worth of files.

"Using Ocarina has greatly simplified and consolidated our archive process – you just turn it on and it works," said Saker Klippsten, IT manager, Zoic Studios. "Not only has it increased our nearline storage capacity, allowing us to keep everything we need online, but also drastically reduced the amount of time required to manage the archive process and aid artists in retrieving content from tape. Our artists are more productive, our IT department has more time to devote to other mission-critical tasks, and the cost savings achieved has opened up our budget to fund new IT projects."

At least two other major movie studios have experienced similar data reduction and cost savings as a result of deploying the Ocarina ECOsystem.

Validated by independent fact-checking analyst firm TechValidate, those studios report:
Space savings of up to 65% on online storage;

• Support of 1 PB media archive on only 250TB of physical storage;
• Deployment of a cost-effective nearline archive that significantly increases operation productivity, while reducing the net price of disk;
• All storage optimization achieved losslessly with perfect data integrity.

"Using Ocarina has made it possible and cost-effective for Rainmaker to maintain an online archive," said Dave Algar, principal data administrator, Rainmaker. "Any CG animation, post-production or FX studio, small or large, might benefit from Ocarina’s unique data reduction technology because it is specifically designed to address the growth, performance, and data availability challenges that are facing our industry."