Animation Studio Illumination Mac Guff Depends on Avere and HGST

Avere Systems, Inc., a provider of hybrid cloud enablement solutions, and HGST, a Western Digital brand, are helping animation house SASU Illumination Mac Guff build its next level infrastructure to support its expanded production pipeline, increased number of artists and doubled per-film global active data.

Illumination Mac Guff, a French subsidiary of Universal Pictures and a studio for animated feature films, is known for blockbusters such as the Despicable Me films, Minions, The Secret Life of Pets and Sing.

“We looked at a number of gateway/object-storage systems but no other vendors offered equivalent levels of tested interoperability, direct industry experience and expert support,” said Bruno Mahe, head of technology, Illumination Mac Guff. “The Avere and HGST solution provides essential performance, scale and economy, but it was the depth and strength of the corporate relationships-between Avere and HGST and with Illumination Mac Guff-that sealed the deal. This is a long-term solution, and we’re confident of long-term support, continued investment in the technologies and vendor viability.“

Since the studio’s original deployment of Avere in 2012, the commercial success of its movies has accelerated data growth and I/O requirements as well as raised higher expectations from the industry and movie audiences. One of Illumination Mac Guff’s biggest challenges stems from keeping all their digital assets online – necessary for content to be quickly found, reused and monetized. To keep the creativity flowing and artists’ work uninterrupted by IT, Illumination Mac Guff tapped Avere and HGST to solve their long-term active archive requirements.

Fast NAS and Petabyte-Scale Object Storage with Avere and HGST
At the Illumination Mac Guff data center, an Avere FXT Edge filer cluster serves as a gateway to HGST’s ActiveScale object storage system, providing transparent NFS-to-S3 (Amazon S3-compliant interface) object storage translation for access to the archived data. Over 2PB of digital assets have been consolidated from a variety of second-tier NAS systems to provide reliable online access to the studio’s entire archive of finished productions. Using the Avere technology with the HGST ActiveScale system gives Illumination Mac Guff a more cost-effective archive solution that also delivers required performance with scalability and durability for petabytes.

“The Avere and HGST solutions let us effectively shield studio artists from data access complexities and fluctuating rendering workloads, keeping them productive and free to focus on artistic vision,” added Mahe.

In addition to the archive solution, Avere front-ends about 6PB of production-data capacity across two tier 1 storage clusters. Avere ensures performing I/O to the studio’s 80,000 core render farm, as well as to approximately 1,000 artist workstations.

“We have a long, successful history of working with high profile animation studios. The volume of data generated by studios like Illumination Mac Guff is staggering and the dependency on access to that data has a direct impact on their bottom line,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO, Avere. “When they called on us to support the development of the next stage of their infrastructure, it was a natural fit to partner with HGST.“

“The winning combination for Illumination Mac Guff is performance, scale, and the economics of cloud storage on premises,” said Phil Bullinger, SVP and GM, data center systems, Western Digital. “And that is precisely what the combined strength of the HGST ActiveScale System and Avere FXT Edge filers delivers. We look forward to supporting Illumination Mac Guff through their continued petabyte growth and worldwide success.“

Case study

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French Animation House Illumination Mac Guff Increases Film Output
With Avere filer  
2014.09.18 | Press Release