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Entertainment Production Environments

BlueArc Storage Speeds Delivery and Increases Quality of CGI

Creativity and talent drive great visual results. Lightning fast storage is the accelerator. In CGI development, quality and speed are vital. BlueArc lets artists create more revisions and dramatically speeds render farm output ö fueling extraordinary productions on schedule while reducing costs.

BlueArc's goal is to provide our customers the most scalable network storage solution alongside the best total cost of ownership with superior return on investment. BlueArc's SiliconServer family offers the most scalable, highest performing network storage systems in the world. BlueArc customers benefit from lower total cost of ownership through improved productivity and efficiency derived from high data throughput, storage consolidation and the reduction of costs through simplified management.

With more CGI shots now required for the average film, leading visual effects studios have had to focus on ways to improve and accelerate the artistic process. Carefully applying new technology, studios have been able to improve artist quality, shave time off production schedules and create more scenes. Bottom line benefits? The ability to produce higher quality work, win more contracts, and generate greater revenue.

At the heart of a CGI network, BlueArc network storage systems offer industry-leading performance to drive stunning improvements in rendering speeds and dramatically reduce artist wait times from file transfers to downloading shadow masks. BlueArc removes the data-flow constraints that bottleneck even the most powerful render farms. This means faster renders, fewer dropped frames, and far less rework for the render wranglers. And BlueArc storage provides fast data access that allows artists to focus their attention on spectacular results and higher quality.

Knowing that large, concurrent projects often require fast deployment or storage upgrades, BlueArc's unique modular architecture makes it as easy and affordable as possible to handle this dynamic environment. With features like Tiered Storage that allow mixing high-performance, "active fileä disk drives with lower-cost, "archivalä disk drives while allowing massive capacity scaling up to 4 petabytes behind a single BlueArc system. When creative teams need to quickly expand storage or increase performance, BlueArc provides simple, modular upgrades that require no expensive "fork-liftä replacements.

BlueArc storage solutions:

Optimized for use by digital artists. Using BlueArc's Titan, many of today's top effects studios have been able to remove storage constraints and eliminate the need for specialized infrastructures or data distributed across compute nodes. Thanks to Titan, companies are enjoying significant reductions in render time, and no more failures or "hangsä due to I/O timeouts. Titan also reduces artist wait times for source files by providing smooth, simultaneous user access to shared datasets. This removes the need for duplicate datasets, reducing versioning errors and greatly simplifying data management, all while improving the work environment, reducing overtime and night production costs.

Solutions that increase creative productivity and help contain production costs.

Titan, built upon BlueArc's patentedhardware-accelerated architecture, delivers the most flexible, high performance, highly scalable, network storage solution available today. By maximizing data access and user loads with extremely low latency, Titan dramatically accelerates the process of digital image creation and rendering and enables collaboration among a team of artists. In addition, Titan's enterprise-class management tools provide the assurance of ongoing access to each creative project's critical files. The end result is increased productivity in the digital pipeline through improved performance and capacity while reducing the cost of ownership.

BlueArc's Titan scales with your digital workflow.

In today'sdigital production environments, as new server and networking technologies are deployed, to meet the increasing demand on CGI and animation creativity, storage systems must be upgraded to meet the growing needs of the digital pipeline. To scale capacity and performance, most storage systems require an expensive, "forkliftä upgrade. BlueArc's Titan eliminates these painful hardware replacement costs, by delivering a more scalable modular solution with maximum flexibility that allows creative teams to upgrade server modules and capacity without replacing the entire system. With Titan's ability to scale, it will continue to grow as you are awarded more projects, take on more artists or move to higher resolution projects.

Tiered storage enables a more cost effective digital workflow.

Titan is built to address a variety of storage needs and budgets.Studios with heavy renders require maximum throughput, while others may require lower throughput at reduced cost. Unlike traditional solutions that require a separate storage server to address each need, BlueArc's unique Tiered Storage supports any combination of fast Fibre Channel or lower cost SATA disk drives behind a single Titan. This helps studios drive down the cost of deploying and maintaining separate storage. Titan's all-in-one design allows administrators to manage throughput, storage capacity, or budgets, depending on the digital workflow requirements.

Stunning visual effects result from creative inspiration matched with the brilliant use of ever more powerful technology. The most innovative CGI creations require giving artists the time to design their vision of reality and supporting that vision with rendering capabilities that are never the bottleneck. In a world where rendering is done by advanced compute clusters, and image files move on ultra-high-speed networks, storage systems can become the bottleneck to remarkable results. BlueArc eliminates that bottleneck by delivering fast, tiered and scalable storage that fosters extraordinary achievement.