1.6PB of DDN Storage at Ringling College of Art and Design

Ringling College of Art and Design relies on DDN Storage SFA as the foundation of an unified content creation and storage platform.

Offering a broad set of fine arts and design majors, students are empowered to push the boundaries of computer-generated graphics to create more visually compelling content.

With a better than 2:1 computer-to-student ratio, Ringling College’s 1,300 undergraduates take advantage of HPC clusters coupled with DDN storage to streamline the entire content lifecycle of their creative projects, encompassing advertising, computer animation, digital film-making, game design and more.

At any time, Ringling College renders tens of thousands of frames while concurrently handling hundreds of other projects, which generates 1.6PB of storage and requires a robust, reliable, large-scale data management infrastructure to support digital content creation and collaboration.

To deliver truly transparent access to project data, the college deployed a pair of DDN SFA systems with the ZFS file system, enabling students to store digital content in individual home spaces they could readily access, regardless of platform or location.

With its storage and compute environment, the school can render 2.8 million frames in one week, which would have taken 89 years to complete on a high-end workstation.

With DDN’s IO/s and bandwidth performance, students can create, share, collaborate on and archive all of their project files; the entire process of ingesting, editing, transcoding, processing, distributing and storing data is handled without interruption or student intervention.

Ringling College alumni have taken advantage of their technically advanced education to amass major awards; a graduate led the creative team for Big Hero 6, the 2015 Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature Film; another directed Feast, the 2015 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film.

DDN Delivers Performance to Meet Next-Gen Media Production Needs
DDN’s massively scalable storage will help Ringling College stay ahead of 4K migration challenges. Moreover, it provides tight integration with Ringling’s variety of commercial workflow applications, including Pixar RenderMan, Adobe After Effects, Maxon Cinema 4D, Chaos Group V-Ray and Foundry Nook.

To safeguard against system disruptions, the school also takes advantage of DDN’s built-in redundancy and HA features, including real-time data integrity and error correction.

Dr. Larry Thompson, president, Ringling College of Art and Design, said: “DDN plays an extremely important role in our environment. We don’t believe in jump drives or portable HDDs. It’s really rewarding to see what our IT team has been able to do with our high-performance DDN storage that lets any student get on any machine at any time and be creative.”

Mahmoud Pegah, director of technology, Ringling College of Art and Design, said: “It made perfect sense to go with DDN storage for the sheer value of its solution for our campus. Not only did DDN deliver the best price-performance, we were confident the company’s Storage Fusion Architecture could scale in both capacity and IO/s to accelerate our collaborate workflows.“