BlueArc Storage Selected by Illumination Entertainment

BlueArc Corporation announced that Illumination Entertainment, a producer of family films for Universal Pictures, has selected its storage system.

One of the system’s first tasks is to manage the animation rendering on the animated feature Dr. Seuss The Lorax, currently in production at Mac Guff, Illumination’s Paris-based animation production partner. The move further demonstrates Illumination’s commitment to pursuing forward-focused technologies that also reduce environmental impact.
 
Mac Guff, which also worked on Illumination’s worldwide hit Despicable Me, is using two clustered BlueArc Mercury 100 systems at its production studio for artistic rendering and composited images. Additionally, a Mercury 50 is located offsite for business continuity planning.  

French reseller NewNet introduced BlueArc as a data storage solution provider for Mac Guff. Like many digital studios, Mac Guff uses commercial software packages such as Autodesk Maya, but is also a rare example of a studio that uses its own proprietary rendering application, MGLR.
 
"We needed a storage system that could scale to cope with demands placed on it by the rendering applications we use," said Robert Taylor, Illumination’s Associate Producer on the film. "In BlueArc we found a solution that was not only scalable in terms of its expansion capacity but also extremely energy-efficient."
 
The primary factor contributing to Illumination’s energy-efficient capacity is a special server farm configuration – first used on 2010’s Despicable Me. Bruno Mahe, Mac Guff’s Chief Technology Officer further explains: "We have deployed a customised server farm at our French digital production house using IBM’s iDataPlex processing system. The singular configuration of servers in iDataPlex compresses processing power into a small space, reducing energy use by as much as 40 percent relative to traditional server farms."  
 
"We are finding that data-driven businesses like Illumination Entertainment want more sustainable, cost-effective, high-performance storage solutions, but they don’t want speed and capacity at the expense of energy or rack space," said Ravi Chalaka, senior director of solutions and product marketing at BlueArc. "At BlueArc, we’re able to deliver more capacity with lower levels of energy consumption than competing systems."  
 
BlueArc will exhibit its solutions and post-production customer deployments at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show, taking place April 11-14, 2011 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.