BlueArc Storage Used in Clash of the Titans

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BlueArc cut a press release this afternoon detailing their role in the recently released Clash of the Titans movie.  According to the release, Cinesite used the new BlueArc Mercury storage system as the basis for rendered animation and composited shots.  All in all, it fed over 200 terabytes of data to render farm of 2500 cores.

The movie industry continues to have a voracious appetite for digitally created visual effects of ever increasing complexity and realism,” said Antony Hunt, managing director of Cinesite.

“We identified last year that we would need to increase our storage capacity threefold but did not necessarily want to add to our old cluster and be constrained by the performance of the existing storage nodes on it,” he continued.  “We were also conscious that certain aspects of our old system were struggling to keep pace with the ever increasing amount of randomly accessed data and needed to be revisited. After initial selection we conducted a series of acceptance tests on BlueArc and other vendors’ storage before making our final decision. We spoke with colleagues at other visual effects companies here in London who have BlueArc systems and only heard good things.”

Cinesite typically handles up to eight projects at any one time with more than 350 VFX artists concurrently accessing thousands of files with sizes varying from just a few kilobytes to hundreds of gigabytes, frequently in unpredictable sequential and random patterns, placing enormous demands on throughput and I/O performance.

We are thrilled that Cinesite has chosen our new multi-tier virtualized storage solution to manage its highly demanding storage requirements,” said Mike Gustafson, president and CEO of BlueArc.  “Our architecture is uniquely optimized to benefit businesses with high performance, scalable storage needs and that’s why BlueArc is fast becoming the solution of choice for companies in the film-making and CGI industries.”

For more info, read the full release here.