Download a PDF version of BlueArc's Rhythm & Hues Case Study
Rhythm & Hues Studios uses BlueArc’s Titan to dramatically reduce render times and deliver real-time data access to hundreds of special effects artists. The bottom line? No more downtime. Reduced costs across the infrastructure. And, a streamlined digital pipeline that produces higher quality product in less time.
Rhythm & Hues Studios is an 18 year-old computer animation and visual effects studio that gained top industry recognition for its groundbreaking work on “Babe,” which earned the studio an Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects in 1995.
Since then, the studio, based in Marina Del Rey, Calif., has amassed a credit list of over 100 feature films. Its work is featured in dozens of Hollywood hits, including “Harry Potter,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Elf,” “Scooby-Doo” 1 and 2, and “Garfield.” Currently, Rhythm & Hues is in production on the highly anticipated “Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The company has also worked on numerous popular television commercials, including the popular GEICO Gecko and the Coca-Cola Polar Bears.
"Any time we can make a purchase of storage technology that effectively enhances our ability to do things faster, do things better and with less human intervention, that's better for the entire business."
"Although our primary function is the creation of art, our infrastructure is all based around our use of storage, which is our life blood."
"A selected scene file requiring ASAP rendering used to take six hours before the overhaul. It now takes only 15 minutes.
-- Mark Brown,Faced with a demanding schedule, the studio knew its digital pipeline needed to run as fast as a racehorse. Yet, its underlying IT infrastructure strained to perform frequent renders on the huge graphics files developed by the studio’s artists and producers. In just a few years, the studio’s storage had skyrocketed from slightly more than a terabyte to nearly 100 terabytes. Although the company’s primary function is the creation of art, it knew key to the speed of its digital workflow was having the right storage to handle large files and facilitate their frequent movement around the network.
Unfortunately, the superheroes brought to life by Rhythm & Hues’ computer animation and visual effects shop were powerless to solve the studio’s mounting data storage problems. So, the company decided to embark on a sweeping storage infrastructure overhaul. This included the use of advanced network storage systems linked to bigger-bandwidth backbone connections.
The studio knew that failure to address its growing storage and networking needs could eventually cause decreased productivity, and an increased cost to retain and acquire new customers—a cost it could ill-afford, given its already competitive, price-conscious and deadline-driven industry. To tackle its bottleneck/downtime challenge, the company knew it needed high performance storage that could also deliver superior availability and seamless access to scores of users.
Rhythm & Hues selected BlueArc's Titan, largely because of its innovative architecture that builds functionality right into the device’s programmable hardware. Unlike NAS devices with mostly software-driven features, the studio was able to see the Titan as "NAS on steroids," due to its unique hardware-based architecture. "Thanks to the Titan, we got a big boost in speed and a marked acceleration of throughput. In fact, we’ve tripled device performance," said Mark Brown, Vice President of Technology.
"On the first day after the full-day installation, the BlueArc box was put into service. Within just hours, people were happy and the downtime was gone. It allowed us to remove all our data bottlenecks, which meant my system administration team could go on to dealing with other things instead of having to deal with day-to-day trivial aspects of data bottlenecks," said Brown.
Rhythm & Hues’ BlueArc storage solution registers significant performance improvements over the studio’s prior system. These included:
In addition to these performance benefits, the studio is now in a position to achieve significant cost benefits, such as:
In thinking about the substantial savings realized by choosing the BlueArc servers over competing alternatives, it’s important to stress the business benefits of the savings combined with the expenses avoided. The digital effects and animation teams at Rhythm & Hues now have greater flexibility to make their art perfect, yet within a greatly reduced production time. Not only does this translate into increased creative capacity at the studio, but also tighter margins. The company is able to pass these savings on to customers in the form of lower rates for their services, which helps them stay in the hunt when bidding for new business.
Another key value brought by BlueArc was partnership. "When Rhythm & Hues first started working with BlueArc, the company worked directly with their engineering team," said Brown. Rhythm & Hues had one or two BlueArc engineers on site at almost all times, and were in constant contact, fostering a team effort that helped ensure that the product fit their needs. In addition, the company received system training from BlueArc. Through the collaborative effort of teams and the simple, straightforward administration of the Titan, the training sessions were short and effective.
So the bottom line is this: Rhythm & Hues solved what were daunting data bottleneck problems with a system designed to work well into the future, including the likely use of 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking technology. "The performance of BlueArc’s Titan, combined with the resulting decrease in administrative time and expense, has allowed Rhythm & Hues to transition resources previously dedicated to storage support into other areas that directly impact the quality of the studio’s digital effects and animation," said Brown. "In the end, that’s exactly what we wanted: a solution that could free us to put more work into the art and less work into the infrastructure."