This article is more than 1 year old

Making movies: Sucking up on-prem files for cloud burst compute

It’s an Avere gateway Jim, but not as we know it

Avere has won another movie special FX house as a customer. No surprise there, but this one uses Avere in the cloud to suck up data from on-premises Isilon filers to feed EC2 compute instances running the rendering work.

ILP, or Important Looking Pirates, a Swedish animation and digital effects studio, has renderable and other files stored on scale-out Isilon filers.

Its capacity to take on work is limited by its access to servers. They are there, in place with a constant resource availability level.

But work comes in waves, meaning sometimes there are too many servers, and sometimes not enough. If it could burst compute to the cloud, spinning up thousands of EC2 instances when needed, and then collapse them when the work is over, that would be good.

The data files are large in number and collectively huge in size and you can’t hire UPS to deliver them on a hard drive to Amazon when they're needed. Networking the cloud EC2 instances across a WAN to the on-premises filers is unworkable because of the long latencies involved.

IP_650

Grab from ILP’s website

What ILP did was to use a cloud gateway in the cloud, a software-only instance of Avere’s FXT cloud storage gateway. Generally vFXT, as it’s called, interfaces slow S3 storage, providing both read and write caching so that faster but expensive Amazon EFS storage doesn’t have to be used.

ILP pointed its vFXT at its on-premises Isilon system, span up the EC2 instances and started burst compute rendering in the cloud.

ILP has been working on television projects such as the Starz series “Black Sails” and the upcoming adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” for Syfy, formerly known as the Sci Fi Channel. When working on Black Sails ILP used the Avere software to double its render capability overnight and so meet a deadline.

Niklas Jacobson, co-founder of ILP, said: “Without Avere, the alternative would be to either buy more hardware or to reduce our output – which is not an option. We don’t have to be as selective or worried when taking on jobs, we don’t have to pick and choose jobs based on when their delivery dates are, and we can take on jobs and scale on an as-needed basis.”

Avere president and CEO Ron Bianchini told us that the top 12 grossing movies in both 2013 and 2014 were rendered using Avere FXT file access accelerators. He expects that to happen this year as well. FXT is a de facto standard. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like