Rotor Studios was founded in 1998 as a full service production company and over 20 years later they continue to evolve to stay ahead of a rapidly advancing technology market. This has led to the creation of an award-winning CG studio and a renowned development team who relentlessly pursue and invest in the latest technical innovations. Recently it also led to the requirement for a state-of-the-art shared storage solution and for that they turned to Digistor and the Dell EMC Isilon H500.
Rotor Studios’ Head of IT Joshua Baird explained, “Two of our main commitments to our clients are that complex large-scale projects are managed as easily and efficiently as the smallest jobs and that we have high volume content capabilities. We were hitting hardware reliability and performance challenges with our previous online storage and I engaged Digistor to help us look at the issues we were experiencing. Digistor evaluated our situation and suggested an Isilon storage solution, one I was familiar with from previous work I’d done at several other leading VFX studios in New York and Sydney.”
Baird continued, “Rotor Studios is a high IOPS environment different in specification to one streaming multiple streams of video and Isilon has a good track record for work in VFX pipelines by having security, redundancy, performance and expandability in a small footprint.”
With Digistor’s help and expertise Rotor Studios chose a 4 x Dell EMC Isilon H500 cluster and shared storage solution with a RAW size of 240TB.
The Dell EMC Isilon H500 NAS Storage solution they chose uses Intel Xeon processors and supports a wide range of enterprise file workloads on the versatile Dell EMC Isilon H500 scale-out NAS platform. This enables Rotor Studios to gain high throughput for demanding applications and gives them easy scalability to handle unstructured data growth. The newly-installed Isilon H500 also integrates an efficient hybrid storage design that combines four Isilon nodes in a single 4U chassis and delivers over 80% storage utilisation, which helps Rotor Studios lower their storage and related data centre costs.
Baird added, “Isilon remains the leader in unstructured data workflows among stiff competition from Qumulo, HPE, and NetApp. Isilon is also a complete, all in one box solution with a balance between granular control and ease of use. They also have strong representation in Australia with a skilled team of experts and are supported extremely well by Digistor.”
It’s clear that Rotor Studios’ new Dell EMC Isilon H500 shared storage solution has made a significant and positive impact on the company, its efficiency of output and workflows.
Baird concluded, “Our new Dell EMC Isilon H500 shared storage solution has increased performance and reliability so that everyone – render farm included – is more productive and as we all appreciate, less time waiting means more time spent being creative. Our IT resources are freed up to focus on other parts of the operation safe in the knowledge that the H500 keeps speeding along. This creates efficiencies further allowing the creative teams to ‘produce’ more. We’re very happy with the H500 and with Digistor’s role in recommending the product, helping us install it and maximise its efficiency.”
Digistor: www.digistor.com.au
