INTERCONNECTS

Award-winning VFX company uses clustered storage to streamline workflow and reduce costs: At SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles, Isilon Systems today announced that The Orphanage, an award-winning visual effects studio that has worked on a number of major Hollywood films including Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Sin City, and Superman Returns, has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as the primary storage platform for its latest and largest project to date. The Orphanage is using Isilon IQ to unify, manage and access the entirety of its latest major motion picture project from a single, high-performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage - streamlining the post-production process and accelerating the project's time-to-completion. "At The Orphanage, we pride ourselves on delivering leading-edge visual effects for major Hollywood films that continually advance the state of the art. With our latest project, we faced unprecedented data storage requirements for a single motion picture, requiring a unique solution with the scalability and ease of use necessary to cost-effectively power our workflow," said David Lloyd, Head of Systems, The Orphanage. "Isilon clustered storage delivered in full, enabling us to deliver the highest quality product and meet our deadline without worrying about administrating the system or managing complex capacity additions." Prior to using Isilon IQ, The Orphanage did not have a storage solution capable of creating a single file system and single volume with the scale required to store an entire motion picture project. However, by deploying Isilon clustered storage, The Orphanage was able to unify the entire project onto one, easy to use, "pay as you grow" clustered storage system, removing costly data access and management barriers and dramatically simplifying its storage architecture and post-production operations. Additionally, Isilon IQ's unique ability to seamlessly integrate with multiple operating environments - from Linux and Unix, to Mac and Windows - provided The Orphanage's many users with immediate, concurrent data access, further accelerating its workflow and maximizing system efficiency. "As audiences continue to demand more realism and visual impact from motion pictures, leading-edge visual effects are a critical component in enabling Hollywood studios to meet this demand with each new release," said Steve Fitz, Senior VP of Global Field Operations, Isilon Systems. "The Orphanage's portfolio speaks for itself, while their use of Isilon clustered storage sets the template for post-production companies looking to maximize the productivity of their operations in delivering the next generation of visual effects." Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems, including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ, and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.