Sony Innovation Studios Customer of of Pavilion

Pavilion Data Systems, Inc. announced that Sony Innovation Studios Inc., a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), is in the process of deploying the firm’s storage array as part of an easy to use, scalable, and dense solution that supports high speed protocols.

Sony Innovation Studios is a facility launched on the SPE studio lot in June 2018 to empower storytellers around the world to produce content using new technologies, tools and techniques including real-time volumetric virtual production with Atom View software.

The facility chose Pavilion storage to be the storage solution in its unified use case for volumetric capture, an increasing performance and latency hungry application for the rendering of 3D virtual and mixed environments.

The Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array (HFA) has a low consistent and predictable latency, density, linear scalability, and affordable price. The technology storage needs of M&E are aligned with Pavilion’s product functionality and this use case represents a continuation of firm’s inroads in this vertical.

“With the ever-increasing amount of data being captured and processed in our media workflows, performance and density of storage systems is of primary importance. Pavilion’s Hyperparallel flash array allowed us to easily meet these demands while future proofing our storage infrastructure for the next gen workflows,” said Michael Pearce, manager of production systems, Sony Innovation Studios. “The combination of performance due to parallelism, operational simplicity and density is unmatched in the industry.“

The deployment is in partnership with Alliance Integrated Technologies, LLC and Pixit Media Ltd, who worked with Sony Innovation Studios to map out the entire solution.

“Volumetric capture brings a new paradigm of size and information capable of being stored and requiring the highest performance in render speeds,” said Ben Leaver, CEO, Pixit Media, “With an approach that mimics a director class core switch architecture, Pavilion’s approach to multi-line card, multi-controller design means PCIe speeds to each drive, and massive bandwidth to the network over a low latency RDMA protocol.“

“To enable the solution as designed, we had to address the challenge of meeting the performance requirements of GPU based rendering., said Billy Russell, CTO, Alliance Integrated Technologies, “It was clear that a 100GbE infrastructure was needed to deliver the data. We also wanted the ability to scale in the future to 200 and 400GbE and support migration to tier-2 or cloud as data ages off. The clear core to this solution was the combination of Pixit Media’s PixStor solution and the Pavilion Hyperparallel flash Array, with support for the latest in high speed Ethernet protocols such as RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) direct to the Linux host, cloud migration with Ngenea and an underlying SDS architecture, this solves the core infrastructure challenges.“

“M&E companies, like Sony Innovation Studios, have extremely exacting standards and requirements for movie and video rendering,” said VR Satish, CTO and co-founder, Pavilion. “Working with partners at Pixit Media and Alliance IT to develop the best of breed solution for Sony Innovation Studios was an extreme pleasure. We look forward to replicating this solution for other major studios that are implementing Volumetric Capture and other M&E workflows which demand the unmatched performance and extremely low latency our combined solution offers.“

Pavilion has multiple deployments in the M&E vertical and is continuing to expand its footprint in this space.