Addressing high-performance storage conditions

Whiskytree’s team of artists, designers, and technicians use industry-standard applications such as Maya, Houdini, Arnold, Gaffer, and Nuke on Linux, along with custom tools to create computer graphics and visual effects.

Prior to Panasas, Whiskytree used ageing fibre channel infrastructure that was power-hungry, complex and lower performing. The company sought a reliable, easy-to-manage network-attached storage (NAS) solution to balance mixed-file uses and rendering across its entire render farm to match the performance demands of its growing team and facility.

“When we engaged with Panasas, we had recently tripled our employee count in a single month, while simultaneously finalising the build-out of our new facility and network infrastructure, all while working on a 700-shot feature film project,” said Jonathan Harb, Chief Executive Officer and owner of Whiskytree. 

“Panasas not only delivered the scalable performance that we required during this critical period, but also delivered an exceptionally high level of support and expertise. This allowed us to add artists at the rapid pace we needed with an easy-to-work with solution that didn’t require fine-tuning to maintain and improve our workflow and capacity in an uninterrupted fashion. 

“We literally moved from our old location on a Friday, then began work in our new facility the following Monday morning, with no production downtime. The company’s ‘set it and forget it’ appliance resulted in overall smooth operations, even under the trying circumstances.” 

The Panasas ActiveStor storage system supports modern media and entertainment workflows with limitless performance scaling, management simplicity, and consistently high performance regardless of workload complexity. ActiveStor is deployed as a scale-out plug-and-play appliance that runs the PanFS parallel file system on industry-standard commodity hardware. 

PanFS runs on Linux and features intelligent data placement across three tiers of media – metadata on NVMe, small files on solid-state drives (SSDs) and large files on hard disk drives (HDDs) – resulting in optimised performance for all data types. 

“Data-intensive VFX pipelines demand powerful processing of complex assets with a mix of high-resolution live plates, complex rendered 3D geometry, and simulation effects like smoke and water. If your storage can’t keep up, artist time is wasted, and deadlines suffer,” said Jim Donovan, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Panasas.