Absolute
Absolute
Absolute’s Chief Engineer, Tom Spenceley, explains: “As our business grows and image resolutions increase so too do our bandwidth, capacity and density requirements. It’s fundamental that we had the capability necessary to effectively meet the demands of a growing studio.”
Alongside the transfer, pixitmedia was able to replace a dated legacy Fibre Channel SAN with pixstor, an integrated storage solution providing 297Tb of usable storage space. Appearing as local storage with realtime, general and nearline pools for different users, the installation moved the entire storage infrastructure to a remote DC private cloud-based model.
“Refreshing the rest of the infrastructure alongside the move to pixstor meant we virtually had an entirely new facility; everything other than a handful of Macs and blade servers was installed fresh at the data centre,” continues Spenceley. “We needed to meticulously plan the installation of our new network, migration and placement of data and deployment of PCoIP and pixstor caching technology to make the switch possible over a single weekend.”
OPEX Predictability
Shifting to this outsourced model and incorporating pixstor has provided multiple benefits for Absolute Post. The principle cost benefits include a reduction in the requirement for central London real estate, and a decrease in hardware support from the IT team, meaning increasing input into creative solutions for clients. Furthermore, all hardware and software purchased can now be classed as a service rather than a capital asset, meaning that spending is moved to OPEX, meaning predictable costs.
As well as high, predictable performance and straightforward volume expansion which enables ever-changing demands in resource-intensive technologies such as CGI and rendering to be addressed, there are additional benefits within the ability to cache.
“The pixitmedia team integrated caching into the solution from the off, and this cache node (gateway) provides consistent performance back at the studio for those systems we still host locally. We can now do clever things with our metadata that we couldn’t do with the previous system. Additionally, data is backed up and archived using IBM TSM software that tightly integrates with the pixitmedia file system,” says Spenceley.
A challenge we consistently face within a growing team is the organisation of data. All users now seamlessly connect to the same central storage pool helping to eliminate unnecessary duplication and movement of data. The installation of pixstor also guarantees sustained performance regardless of filesystem utilisation, allowing us to take on large workloads without any issues.
Large workloads – no issues
pixitmedia supplies an open platform that eliminates vendor lock-in. “Commodity hardware is a huge benefit as it means we can get the parts anywhere,” continues Spenceley. “The policy-based placement and migration is also a real key benefit. Previously we’d need additional licenses, but we don’t need to worry about whether we have bought another feature with the pixstor solution as it provides tiering as a basic part of the system, something that our dated system couldn’t manage without a huge expense.”
“As is so often the way with these systems, it is very difficult to get hold of concise documentation. However, pixitmedia provide us with great technical support that’s very comprehensive and responsive. They’re hands-on and there with you straight away getting their fingers mucky. We also enjoyed the tenacity of the team during installation, which is reflective of their real care, attention and level of detail in each project.”
