Download a PDF version of BlueArc's DKP Studios Customer Case Study
DKP Studios relies on BlueArc's Titan storage system at the core of its business to allow the studio to bring higher quality digital animation and effects work to market faster for feature films and IMAX productions -- all while eliminating throughput issues and improving overall system reliability.
DKP Studios, based in Toronto, is a subsidiary of IDT Entertainment and one of Canada's largest animation, visual effects and compositing post-production companies. Since 1985, DKP has gained an international reputation for excellence for its high-end, digital animation and effects used in feature films, television, video features and commercials.
DKP's animation and special effects are used by Hollywood's top studios, including 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. and New Line/Alliance Films. The company's work can also be seen in over 3000 commercials, including award-winning spots for Suzuki, Ford, Pepsi, GMC, Polaroid, Michelin, Bose, PlayStation and Fisher Price.
As DKP's reputation continued to grow, the company faced an increase in both requirements for each picture and the number of simultaneous projects underway. Television shows, now created in the new, high-definition standard, required two to three times the data storage as projects of the previous year. High-quality IMAX movie projects also heavily taxed the existing infrastructure with an increasing demand for both storage and high data throughput.
As access to data slowed, the company's creative talent would find themselves waiting upwards of 15-20 minutes for large files to load, and productivity suffered. Additionally, due to performance limitations of the existing storage and network infrastructure, DKP often found production runs dropping frames during compositing.These dropped frames would require the company to duplicate work and restore lost data, expanding project times and decreasing staff confidence.
Given its exponential storage growth and increasing throughput requirements, DKP looked at several storage solutions on the market, both in the NAS and SAN space, before concluding that BlueArc's Titan would deliver the high performance storage the studio needed to scale at the speed of its business. Titan's unique hardware-based architecture was able to help the company meet the demanding requirements of its 400-CPU Linux render farm, thereby freeing the artists to focus on the quality of their product, rather than working around technology limitations.
In the company's initial Titan deployments, one 20-terabyte system was designed to store data offloaded from the render farm, while a second 10-terabyte system was designed to store data used in compositing. Through its own rigorous testing and positive word-of-mouth from industry colleagues using BlueArc, DKP learned of Titan's dramatic performance gains, even after the studio chose to use all-Serial ATA disks to reduce up-front costs.
BlueArc's Titan has given DKP a single, reliable storage platform at the heart of its digital pipeline. The systems enable DKP to add or subtract storage as needs change, and to change data flow rates to different production areas as required. With the systems' dramatic performance capabilities, DKP has been able to count on Titan to accept all data from the render farm, and pass it to compositing at unprecedented speeds. Since the Titans were installed, DKP also estimates that not a single frame has been dropped.
Before installing the Titans, DKP's production process and high data requirements would literally bring the systems to a crashing halt. Since the Titans, the company reports no downtime events.
"These things just motor – even with our render farm running full blast," said Terry Dale, Vice President of Production at DKP. "In the past few years, we've brought servers down. With Titan, it still accepts the data without a problem."
"Thanks to Titan's ability to deliver unfailing uptime and reduce the time artists need to wait for tasks to be completed, DKP's most imaginative minds don't lose that creative edge," adds Dale, "This gives them the opportunity to complete more iterations in less time, and dramatically improves productivity. Also, with us not needing to constantly manage the storage infrastructure or watch 'every little piece of data,' dedicated system management requirements have nearly vanished."
With the company's storage needs continuing to expand rapidly, DKP says Titan's ability to increase capacity in line with throughput, simply by adding additional disk shelves has been a real time-saver, while eliminating concerns inherent with more-limited traditional storage solutions.
As Titan offers the company a scalability ceiling far above competitive offerings, DKP can continue to expand their existing systems, limiting the number of machines to manage both now and in the future. By simplifying the company's storage environment, DKP's IT staff can remain small and dedicate their time to other aspects of their technology infrastructure.
"Our IT staff is a tight, small group required to manage our high-end 3D workstations, and our storage and network infrastructure," Dale said. "That is a testament to BlueArc's ability to be managed easily. The Titans were configured and managed, and have just been running ever since."
Having served twenty years at the forefront of digital entertainment production, DKP Studios recognizes the importance of having reliable, high-performance storage at the core of its business. Thanks to its superior throughput and high I/O ceiling, Titan allows the company's artists to focus on the quality of their product, not the underlying infrastructure. This, in turn, has led to additional opportunities and clients.