A52/ELASTIC/ROCK PAPER SCISSORS

Established in 1997 as a destination for the very latest high-end photo-real visual effects, a52 has become home to the industry’s most innovative and talented artists. The boutique full-service studio in Santa Monica works in tandem with award-winning editorial company Rock Paper Scissors and design company Elastic, the latter of which was recently named one of Fast Company’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Entertainment.

a52’s collaborations with top directors, agencies and clients include commercial work for Target, adidas, Chevy and Nike; VFX work on The Social Network; and comprehensive coloring and finishing for the first season of Netflix’s House of Cards.

EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES, TESTING POTENTIAL

When Dell/EMC announced the new Isilon All-Flash Array built with Isilon’s revolutionary OneFS software, people took notice. With the All-Flash Array, Isilon had the potential to provide the throughput to turbo charge high-end, high resolution finishing applications while allowing ingest, rendering, graphics and archive to utilize multiple tiers of storage in a single filesystem.

a52 had been utilizing a traditional workflow, making use of multiple storage subsystems to support different creative applications. Dell EMC serves a key role in providing the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information.

“Not only did DZ carve out the solution we needed from planning to execution, but their highly trained staff also offered our team configuration assistance and training throughout the process,” says Jorgensen. “They recommended the product solution we needed and then provided us with end-to-end service.”

ABOVE AND BEYOND – EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS

With the arrival of the Isilon All-Flash Array, both DZ Solutions and a52 saw the perfect opportunity. Already utilizing Isilon for a complex graphics workflow and archive, the introduction of the Isilon All-Flash Array allowed Bass to include a52’s twelve Autodesk Flame’s on the same file system. “Incorporating a very-high-performance tier directly into our existing filesystem significantly eases a bottleneck in the pipeline between our CG and finishing systems. Renders become immediately accessible to the Flames without additional copying or caching,” Bass mentioned.

During testing, DZ Solutions and a52 were able to push over 4GB/sec to 3 clients at a single node in the Isilon All-Flash Array cluster with minimal performance tuning. Impressed by the stability of the pre-release unit, Bass then decided to put the Isilon All-Flash Array cluster into production with four separate Flame-based projects incorporating HD, 2K and 4K source media finishing at one time on the Isilon All-Flash Array tier. Bass was happy with the results.

While in production, the Isilon All-Flash Array continued to surpass expectations, gaining recognition and appreciation from artists who commented on the noticeable speed improvement over the legacy SAN infrastructure.

As productions continue to push the creative envelope, IT must respond in kind. DZ enables its customers to harness the power innovation to make changes to existing infrastructure that enhance performance and increase efficiency.

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