Digital Domain Productions Implements Avere NAS Optimization

Avere Systems, Inc. announced that Digital Domain Productions, Inc., a digital production company that has delivered visuals for more than 80 movies including Titanic, TRON: Legacy and Real Steel, with work that has earned multiple Academy Awards, has implemented Avere FXT Series NAS appliances at a Las Vegas co-location data center to maximize IOPS and minimize latency of its cloud-based infrastructure to ensure quick access to massive amounts of computer-generated imagery data.

In order to grow cost-effectively, Digital Domain utilizes render nodes co-located in Las Vegas, which access data stored at its locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Vancouver and turn it into media frames. However, without Avere’s FXT products in place, the latency introduced by accessing data across such geographical distances could have derailed Digital Domain’s efforts to leverage the co-location’s space and power benefits.

"We couldn’t do this without Avere in the picture," said Mike Thompson, Sr. Systems Engineer of Digital Domain. "The WAN latency would have killed the applications’ IOPS to the filers. We simply wouldn’t have been able to render frames remotely. In order to grow, we would have been forced to increase our data center footprint in cities with much higher costs for space and power."

Thompson estimates that with Avere, Digital Domain reduced its latency to 0.1 millisecond, which translates into 250x faster performance. In addition to the Las Vegas deployment, Digital Domain also has FXT appliances at its regional locations to provide improved local application performance as well as fast access to non-local storage.

"Co-location data center facilities can be enormously beneficial in helping companies such as Digital Domain leverage cloud computing and lower costs; however, without the ability to minimize the latency introduced by geography, the performance degradation is so great that it can’t be offset by cost reduction," said Ron Bianchini, Avere President and CEO. "Co-locating Avere appliances with compute nodes removes the latency penalty and opens up a new world of possibilities for companies seeking to build highly efficient global storage infrastructures without sacrificing application performance."

FXT Series of appliances feature a tiered file system that organizes data across RAM, Flash, SAS and SATA tiers to provide a 5:1 reduction in disks, power and rack space. The new FXT 3000 and FXT 4000 series hardware platforms are designed for greater scalability and efficiency, doubling the amount of appliances that can be clustered to 50 and providing 7TB of RAM and hundreds of terabytes of SAS or SSD capacity on a single cluster.