Animationsinstitut in Germany Deploys Hammerspace

Hammerspace, Inc. announced that the Animationsinstitut, one of the world’s leading academic institutions for animation, visual effects, technical directing and interactive media, has chosen Hammerspace as the data platform for students and faculty across its distributed campus.

The Animationsinstitut is part of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg (FABW) in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and has established itself as one of the leading international film schools. Hammerspace will be showcasing its work with Animationsinstitut and other leading M&E organizations at FMX 2025 in booth #3.2 in Stuttgart, Germany.

“The ability to use metadata-driven data orchestration policies to automate tiering and protection throughout our environment was a key benefit of Hammerspace,” said Stefan Binggeser, head of technology, Animationsinstitut.

FABW manages between 200 and 250 projects per year, many of which are produced either at or in collaboration with the Animationsinstitut, that include requirements for performing data ingest and processing, as well as supporting multiple students collaborating on a single project. Additionally, the institute was looking for a solution that could take its render workloads out of its on-premises server room into the cloud.

A unique benefit of the Hammerspace platform relates to custom metadata. Animationsinstitut plans to use custom metadata to automate portions of its workflow. “It was very easy to understand that separating metadata from data will be the future,” said Binggeser when referring to the Hammerspace architecture. “We have some workloads that really need performance, and some that require long-term, low-cost storage, so the ability to use metadata-driven data orchestration policies to automate tiering and protection throughout our environment was a key benefit of Hammerspace.“

Another critical aspect of the Hammerspace solution for Animationsinstitut was the ability to ‘assimilate’ data from the school’s existing scale-out NAS system and make that part of the Hammerspace data environment. This allowed Animationsinstitut to keep its scale-out NAS system in place, import that metadata into the Hammerspace metadata layer, and then reuse and repurpose that system for additional storage capacity.

“Being able to reuse hardware was a big deal for us in order to reduce our carbon footprint. Having a solution like Hammerspace that lets you reuse and extend the use of your old systems was an important consideration for us and for many companies in the European Union,” said Binggeser.

This project was delivered in collaboration with Hammerspace’s channel partner dve advanced systems GmbH (dveas), whose commercial support helped streamline the procurement process. Hammerspace’s channel-first approach ensures strong collaboration with local partners to simplify execution and deliver value to customers.

Resources:
Hammerspace Product Page: Global Data Platform
Case Study: Animationsinstitut of Filmakademie BadenWürttemberg (FABW) Chooses Hammerspace as the Data Storage Platform for Students and Faculty Across Distributed Campus
Video: Real-Time Collaboration with Autodesk Flame Workloads on AWS
Whitepaper: Driving Cost-effective GPU Performance with Hammerspace (registration required)