Production Company Framestore Turns to Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced that Framestore Ltd, a visual effects company for film and advertising, has selected Nexenta to manage its multi-petabyte storage needs.

In a world where a picture can be worth millions of dollars, Framestore is known for creating images and visual effects for movie studios around the world. Established in 1995, it has locations in London, New York, Montreal and Los Angeles. Recent projects include movie blockbusters Gravity and Skyfall, as well as advertising campaigns for Audi and Pepsi, and TV shows including Doctor Who.

Managing petabytes of mission-critical data is a challenge, particularly in this creative and fast-paced global business environment. Without access to this data, Framestore wouldn’t be able to meet the production demands of the media and entertainment industry. The IT team at Framestore needed a flexible, scalable, reliable, enterprise storage system to manage its massive data growth, enhance its DR capabilities.

Framestore chose Nexenta’s Software Defined Storage solution to create a storage infrastructure. Working with its technology partner Dell, Inc. to provide the hardware, and utilising the open-source ZFS OS, Framestore selected Nexenta for its combination of technical acumen and an economic product offering.

“Nexenta is a progressive and forward thinking company with a team of highly technical engineers, who integrated well with the Framestore technology team and have been a pleasure to work with,” said Steve MacPherson, CTO, Framestore. “I believe Nexenta is on the crest of a wave, one that has a strong potential to disrupt the storage industry status quo. The coupling of affordable enterprise grade hardware, a strong and open ZFS base, and Nexenta software features provide us with great flexibility in how we design and deploy production storage. Nexenta provides that last critical software and support component that allows us to move everything forward as we re-architect our global storage strategy.“

Tarkan Maner, CEO, Nexenta, said: “Our SDS offering is ideal for the entertainment industry. Unlike the Massively Expensive Storage Systems (MESS) provided by larger vendors who focus on hardware boxes and expensive ‘rip and replace’ models as users hit full capacity, Nexenta has the ability to keep scaling and growing. SDS is the future and Framestore is embracing it as a business-critical function in order to continue its huge success globally.”