Legend3D Selects Isilon

EMC Corporation (EMC) announced
that Legend3D, Inc., the provider of
2D-to-3D media content conversions, has standardized on EMC Isilon scale-out
storage for all of its visual entertainment assets.

Leveraging Isilon’s ability to store vast amounts of high-resolution digital
media, Legend3D has streamlined its management of big data through improved
production management, increased artist productivity and the creation of new
production pipelines for major motion pictures such as Transformers: Dark of
the Moon, Smurfs, Hugo, and The Amazing Spiderman.

Benefits:

• Scalability: After deployment in July 2010, Isilon was instrumental in Legend3D’s
  growth from 50 to over 400 artists in less than a year. Due to its performance
  and scalability for big data, it helped the company to accelerate its move into
  the 2D-to-3D media conversion business.
• Performance: Today, up to 500 Legend3D digital artists can work concurrently with
  large image files stored on Isilon.
• Agility: Legend3D changed
  its digital media work flow and increased artist productivity by over 50% due
  in part to better performance and scalability with Isilon, giving the studio
  increased capacity and eliminating delays.
• Simplified Management: Isilon’s
  reliability and minimal management requirements allowed Legend3D to reduce
  storage administration from three full-time equivalents (FTEs) to one-quarter
  FTE.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

With major 2D-3D film conversion projects generating as much as 100TB
of data weekly, Legend3D’s previous storage environment proved inadequate. IT
staff were charged with clearing out unused data, which always carries the risk
of inadvertently deleting important files. Furthermore, as a result of
Legend3D’s own R&D program, huge production efficiencies were
created that required ever-greater throughput.

As a result, storage and access to data rapidly became a rate limiting step and
downloads to the artist’s desktop computers over the network were sometimes too
slow, impeding the artist’s accelerated productivity. Legend3D needed to
control the pace at which it scaled to ensure that its storage platform adapted
to its existing and future high volume workflows.

Legend3D chose Isilon scale-out storage so it could better
handle the exploding data centric 3D conversion market. After considering other
NAS solutions, Legend3D’s selection was based on the platform’s
ability to scale beyond 500 artists and manage a 100-node render farm. The
company deployed Isilon X-Series systems for its production digital assets and
Isilon NL-Series systems for nearline storage of less frequently accessed data.

The infrastructure supports
Legend 3D’s regular production space of 600TB of digital images and video,
VMware virtual machines, intranet servers and their production asset
management system. To boost performance in data synchronization between
different environments, the company also relies on Isilon IQ Accelerator nodes.

Anthony Lopez, director of IT, Legend3D, said: "By selectively compressing files and moving
them to the Isilon archive, we can save up to 80% of our production space for
certain projects and still regenerate all the necessary data our artists need.
In the future, we’re looking at moving our digital assets into the cloud and
using SmartPools to optimize our capacity and further improve our efficiency.

"Isilon’s excellent
performance and scalability helped our studio grow smoothly from 50 artists to
over 400 in less than a year. Today we can support upwards of 500 artists who
can concurrently accessing the system without any issues or slowdowns. Isilon
has given us peace of mind.

"Our previous storage had
limited performance and capacity, hindering our growth and impeding our ability
to handle our ever increasing volume of production work. Isilon immediately
provided us with infinite scalability along with rapid access times and the
ability to better manage our digital assets.

"The ease of managing
Isilon allows us to focus more on innovation instead of constantly thinking
about storage. We trained our tech staff to set up Isilon in a couple of hours
and we reduced our overall storage admin requirements from three FTEs to
one-quarter FTE today."