Creative Studio Preymaker Deploys Weka File System

WekaIO, Inc. announced that creative studio Preymaker is using the Weka File System (WekaFS) limitless data platform on AWS to share data across different applications and OSs while retaining complete visibility and control of cloud resources with predictable costs.

Preymaker

Founded in 2020, Preymaker is a Visual Effects (VFX) creative studio with a focus on high-quality visual production for digital content. It made the conscious decision to be 100% cloud based, which served it well when the Covid pandemic made it difficult to work in an environment with on-premises infrastructure.

Preymaker employs artists all over the world, from Los Angeles, CA to New York, NYC, London, UK, France, Sweden, and South Africa. With a distributed team like this, the cloud is a platform, as artist workstations can be spun up and down depending on capabilities and project demands.

When Preymaker was unable to find a performing cloud-based solution that allowed both Windows and Linux users to share the same data set, it ended up with an assortment of storage services including Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon FSx for Windows, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). WekaFS limitless data platform on AWS allows artists to collaborate within the same namespace from their many locations and without the need to copy data among different services, while also supporting the high frame rate and high bit-depth throughput it needed.

“Through testing, WekaIO just rose to the top,” said Alan McSeveney, head of technology, Preymaker. “The ability to just hit ‘play’ on Autodesk Flame in front of a customer and display uncompressed rendered content from shared file storage without a hiccup has been a pipe dream within the industry for a long time-and being able to do that from centralized,ta on WekaFS is a huge win for us.“

WekaFS is a POSIX-compliant file system that delivers high streaming bandwidth to media workflows while maintaining low latency across the storage cluster to accelerate application performance. It offers multi-protocol support (POSIX, NFS, SMB, S3) with full file shareability and file locking across different OSs.

Windows, Mac, and Linux users can access and share files from a single project, allowing for collaboration among creative teams. Weka’s users can be productive immediately without having to worry about configuring the underlying infrastructure.

“To capitalize on leveraging talent from around the world, production teams and special effects houses are increasingly looking to take advantage of ‘studios-in-the-cloud’ to bring together the best artists regardless of where they reside,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO, WekaIO. “Though these cloud-based environments are often fruitful from a creative perspective, they have remained more cumbersome from a technical standpoint. Offering a high-performance, scalable, and simple solution like WekaFS Limitless Data Platform on AWS that serves both Linux and Windows from the same file system and namespace, we are able to provide Preymaker and other creative content producers with the technical tools they need to connect with personnel across the hall or across the globe.“

WekaFS on AWS, a cloud-native storage solution available for purchase in AWS Marketplace, allows HPC at massive scale. Deploy WekaFS on any Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instance that has local SSD or NVMe storage and improve file storage. Supporting Amazon EC2 auto scaling groups, Weka also allows users to take advantage of the elastic compute resources available in the cloud for massive scale. It supports Amazon S3 and transparent tiering provides the best cost and capacity scaling.

WekaFS on AWS comes with a set of enterprise features including snapshots, encryption, authentication, and quotas.

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