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Mainframe Entertainment, an IDT Entertainment company, capitalizes on joint storage solution from BlueArc and StorageTek to deliver a reliable, high performance configuration capable of meeting future needs, while accelerating film production times and eliminating project disruptions.
Mainframe is a leader in computer generated (CG) animation for television and direct to video family entertainment. Mainframe has produced over 250 half hours of CG animated television as well as ten CG animated direct to video feature films and two one-hour CG animated television specials. Mainframe’s CG animation expertise is also being used in the production of theatrical feature films, interactive games and commercials.
Established in 1993, Mainframe continues to grow its library of proprietary productions, and has received many prestigious awards for its work on such international brands as Barbie, Hot Wheels, Spider-Man, Casper and Popeye. The company is recognized as a CG animation pioneer having developed the groundbreaking internationally distributed television series ReBoot. Mainframe clients include Sony, Mattel, Lions Gate Home Entertainment, Electronic Arts (Canada) and MTV. Mainframe’s majority shareholder, IDT Corporation, is a NYSE-listed multinational telecommunications and entertainment company.
"Every time the render farm references a texture file, it would take time to register it and take it up the wire. That's where BlueArc makes a difference. If you have an environment with a lot of reference files and a central location, and the central location is BlueArc - it is at least 6 to 8 times faster."
"One of the first things that made it at the beginning was that the box was good to go. It only took 3 1/2 hours to get it from start to serving files. For (our previous system) it took 3 1/2 weeks. That translates into saved money for the company. Right from the get-go, I figure we saved 6-8 weeks of senior sys admin time."
-- Wendi Davies,To develop cutting-edge artistry that tests the boundaries of modern computer generated animation, companies require cutting-edge technology infrastructures – from their artists’ workstations to their network, rendering servers and storage. As Mainframe was seeing an increase in the number of simultaneous projects, the company’s existing storage systems could not cope – seeing hiccups and stalls through the rendering process – as artists would read and write scene and texture files to the same central location. This slow-down forced artists to wait for files to load – reducing productivity and creativity and in turn increasing the artists’ stress as studio-driven deadlines loomed.
As Wendi Davies, IT Manager for Mainframe, said, the major problems with the company’s existing configuration were: a drastic need for storage consolidation, backup and archiving, network performance, and enabling heterogenous operating systems to share files and production data. A solution was required that could help consolidate storage to a single location, while retaining high performance capable of serving the company’s growing artist crew of nearly 300, and the ability to support multiple operating systems concurrently.
After reviewing a number of Network Attached Storage (NAS) offerings, Mainframe selected BlueArc’s Titan SiliconServer in a Tiered Storage configuration, featuring both high performance fibre channel disks and high density ATA drives. Mainframe opted for Titan due to the system’s high performance and high capacity ceiling, but also because Davies found the system so easy to configure and manage compared to alternatives. While it took nearly a month to bring the previous storage system into production and serving files, she said that Titan was put into production a mere 3 1/2 hours after it arrived. This alone saved upwards of six to eight weeks of work for the company’s senior system administrators’ time, Davies said.
Additionally, Mainframe’s existing partnership with StorageTek (STK), who had cemented a relationship through providing the company with tape libraries for backup, provided the company with an opportunity to recognize the benefits of work with two companies focused on delivering best of breed solutions to the customer. Mainframe turned to StorageTek, purchasing 8 terabytes of Fibre Channel and 7 terabytes of ATA disks from StorageTek to integrate behind the company’s Titans – which were optimized and certified for use with STK equipment.
Mainframe has approximately 450 networked clients constantly accessing Titan. For the company, fast and reliable access to scene files, texture files, home directories and e-mail – all stored on BlueArc, is an absolute must.
The Titans’ ability to support a Tiered Storage environment has enabled Mainframe to save money through utilizing less-expensive Serial ATA disks for images and static files, while higher performance fibre channel storage is used for project data requiring frequent interaction – from scene files and texture files to employees' e-mail and home directories. Mainframe also utilizes ATA disks for the company's archival, shot tracker and test projects, defined as anything with fewer than 30 people actively accessing a file or directory. This enables the company’s IT infrastructure to adapt in line with corporate business processes.
Having put the Titans into production, Mainframe has eliminated slowdowns that had long plagued their artists through every step in the creative process. Mainframe’s artists can render directly to and from Titan without seeing a decrease in performance as the file is registered and passed over the network.
"If you have an environment with a lot of reference files, and a central location, and that central location is BlueArc, it is at least six to eight times faster," said Davies.
Speeding up the company's creative process has eliminated project slowdowns and increased the efficiency of Mainframe's artists – who don’t have to work around the technology infrastructure, but can instead embrace its benefits. As Davies recalls, prior to the Titan’s being installed, the company's IT staff would frequently be paged by artists on the floor, upwards of 3-5 times per day. Now she says they have not been paged even once in the last year, since the Titans were installed. This in turn has allowed the IT staff to focus on other issues, from artists’ desktops to the corporate network.
The Titans have been placed at the center of Mainframe's creative workflow. Animated scenes begin as low-resolution animatics, and then are refined by artists - raw body movements are massaged into more detail, and textures are added to the geometry. Through this process, files become iteratively larger, according to Troy Brooks, the company's manager of production technologies. Following this rendering process, the files are then taken to compositing before the project is presented for viewing.
As artists can now complete more tasks in less time, Mainframe finds that the projects' quality has improved – given that artists can now review images more closely and more frequently. Brooks says that in a creative company focused on CG entertainment, projects will still come in just before deadline, but will have seen more iterations.
"How artists spend their time is critical. Given a set number of constraints, it is on how many iterations it can render. Films are never done – you just eventually stop working on them," he said.
Mainframe, having established itself as a leader in CG animation for family entertainment and direct to video projects, is now branching out to extend its offerings to the challenging world of feature films. As projects increase in length and improve in quality, real-time access to creative data becomes imperative, and can mean the difference between finishing a project on time with the desired quality.
Relying on technology partners including BlueArc and StorageTek has enabled Mainframe to focus on the art of their project and the company’s creative soul and vision, rather than be impeded by a substandard infrastructure. BlueArc and StorageTek have delivered a flexible storage solution capable of scaling in capacity and performance as the company’s requirements grow.