A new big data Avatar
The Avatar production generates terabytes of data in various formats, including massive digital files used in creating Avatar’s all-digital, virtual filming environment, small metadata and instructional files, still frames for review, and large media files from Avid systems.
In fact Avatar intense production pipeline created terabytes of data on a weekly and even daily basis, demanding a storage solution with the concurrent performance, scalability and ease of management necessary. Isilon clustered storage with unique “pay as you grow” architecture ensured Avatar‘s scalability and performance issues both. Apart from that, our very own kiwi Weta Digital, which worked out photo-realistic CGI rendering work for Avatar, used similar kind of scalability solution. According to this article
Weta used NetApp kit to store the incoming data, then used a huge number of workstations and bladed servers – with 30,000 cores in total – to work on it. The NetApp filers were fitted with up to five 160GB DRAM cache accelerator cards in their controllers, the PAM (Performance Acceleration Modules) caches, to speed file access by the Weta creative people and the servers.
Finally Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment used FASP v2.0 transport technology from Aspera, a high-performance and secure file transfer solution which enabled the bulk transfer of electronic files between Los Angeles and New Zealand on a daily basis.
“Aspera software has eliminated the transfer bottlenecks of the past, cutting the total turnaround time for content by about one half, with complete security,” says Geoff Burdick, Lightstorm Vice President Production Services & Technology. “We consistently transfer to New Zealand at 45 Mbps over a 45 Mbps link, a 15-30X improvement over standard FTP. Our operators can track the transfer throughout the process and manage the bandwidth used as needed. Additionally, we own the software, so there are no ongoing fees or penalties as we deliver more data. For us, Aspera has been a huge step forward in efficiency and cost-savings.”
Thumbs up for Cameron and his team.
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