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Post-Production House Framestore Chooses Dot Hill

For AssuredSAN 3730 arrays acquired through reseller 101 Data Solutions

Dot Hill
Systems Corporation
announced
that its AssuredSAN 3730 arrays have played a key role in the work done by
international post-production company Framestore Ltd on projects including Lincoln,
Sherlock Holmes, Wrath of the Titans, War Horse
and the Skyfall movie titles.



framestore_540

Established more than 25 years ago,
Framestore has over 600 artists as well as computer scientists, developers and
engineers who work together to create impactful imagery for films and
advertising campaigns forclients including Hollywood studios, and major household
brands.

While delivering Framestore’s largest
post-production film project currently scheduled for release in 2013, its CTO
Steve MacPherson had to devise a new storage strategy and introduce a new
near-line solution to cope with the unprecedented volume of data created over
the three-year term of this particular film project.

The requirement was for a significant amount of the post-production data to be
held live and accessible while retaining
the ability to bring additional, unrelated projects online in parallel. The
volume of data to be kept live was too large for the company’s legacy primary
servers and a tape archive could not give required fast data access. After
reviewing the options, with the assistance of data storage specialist reseller
101 Data Solutions Ltd, MacPherson selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series.

MacPherson said: "Dot Hill has an excellent reputation for engineering and has given
considerable thought to performance. Its systems enabled us to re-engineer how
we approach nearline and archiving, enabling us to deliver a solution much more
flexible and reactive to production requirements. All of this was delivered
under the original budget and has been in production without incident from the
day it was brought online. Dot Hill and 101 Data Solutions have been excellent
partners, and we are very pleased with our choice.
"

Initially half a petabyte of nearline storage was
introduced using a FC infrastructure
based on Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3730 arrays
populated with 3TB drives. This configuration consisted of two RAID systems
each with 288TB of capacity housed in just 16 units of rack space. Now the Dot
Hill dual-controller RAID platform provides the storage capacity for all live
projects: during production it is the nearline tank holding backups, and while
during archiving it is the primary data source with LTO-5 tapes, providing the
second level of backup for added data protection.

MacPherson added: "With the Dot Hill system we can run ZFS on
standard NFS servers, giving us the ability to return multi-TB scenes to
production at much shorter notice. With its greater storage density, we can now
also manage our shows during the archiving stage much more efficiently. This
has given us a whole new approach to storage and archive management, and we
feel far more confident about tertiary storage performance. As technology has
evolved, the growth of data captured on set, as well as raw digital camera
output has meant that storage infrastructure planning is a crucial part of
every project. Finding operational efficiencies is critical to success.

"We continue to expand our portfolio of media
and entertainment customers in this important vertical market segment,
"
said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing at Dot Hill. "Working in close collaboration with our
channel partners we’re bringing to market powerful storage solutions at a
compelling price. Our storage arrays are ideally suited to handle big data
volumes with the flexibility needed by world-leading post production houses
such as Framestore.
"

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