I.E. Effects has installed an Isilon IQ6000x cluster storage system at its Culver City location. With several large stereoscopic projects currently active, the Isilon system expands the company’s ability to manage the data and throughput requirements of multiple jobs. For clients this means increased efficiency and reliability for demanding stereo 3D projects.
The clustered Isilon IQ6000x provides a high degree of redundancy and is easily scalable. “Adding capacity is as simple as plugging a new node into the system,” said Ron Anantavara, technical supervisor at I.E. Effects. “As we add more workstations and render nodes to our pipeline, we needed a storage solution that could handle the bandwidth of all those additional systems simultaneously accessing our storage.”
“The Isilon has a load balancing feature that distributes the bandwidth evenly across all the storage nodes. This keeps it running efficiently as you scale up,” said Mike Braico, executive vice president of sales at Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) who installed the system for I.E. Effects.
Based in North Hollywood, IMT has been helping facilities build stereo 3D production infrastructures since the company started in 2006. This expertise made them a natural fit for I.E. Effects in selecting and configuring the new system. “The explosion in 3D capable digital cinema screens over the last 3 years, and consumers interest in paying for the 3D entertainment will increase the demand for stereo 3D post services,” explained Braico. “I.E. Effects’ experience in doing 3D productions like Michael Jackson’s ‘This is It,’ gives them a leg up on the competition for producing quality stereoscopic content at competitive prices.”
As the workload at I.E. Effects grows, the importance of absolutely reliable storage increases accordingly. “Since each node is like its own storage server, the data is redundant over all your nodes,” said Anantavara. “If one or two nodes go down, your data is not lost. As we all know in this business, downtime is not an option, especially when you’re approaching a delivery date!”
By using the Isilon SyncIQ replication architecture, the system also allows I.E. Effects to sync and deliver digital content seamlessly between Culver City and the newly-opened Michigan location. Having linked storage systems at separate sites also creates a super-redundancy. “If something were to happen to one our facilities we instantly have a backup of our entire system offsite at our sister facility,” explained Anantavara.
“Working on several large [stereoscopic] 3D projects at the same time was one of the deciding factors in going with the Isilon System,” said David Kenneth, founder and president of I.E. Effects. “With 3D doubling the amount of data, our storage servers can fill-up rapidly. As we do more and more [stereoscopic] 3D television projects, we needed a storage system that would be able to handle the grueling pace of broadcast projects.”
