CA S E S T U DY: I L LU M I N AT I O N M AC G U F F
Animation powerhouse Illumination
Mac Guff increases output using
Avere Systems’ FXT Edge solution
Avere’s “real-time looking glass” analysis and vendor-neutral
NAS optimization is a hit with leading French animator
About Illumination Mac Guff
Illumination Mac Guff is one of the
world’s leading studios for animated
feature films. Based in Paris, the
company is known for such global
blockbusters as Despicable Me,
Despicable Me 2 and The Lorax—all
produced by Illumination Entertainment
for Universal Pictures.
As a computer graphics (CG) animation house, Illumination Mac Guff places heavy
demands on its storage arrays. When parent-company Illumination Entertainment began
working on animated feature films in 2004, it only produced one animated feature film per
year. As Illumination Entertainment’s motion picture slate has grown to two to three films
per year, so, too, must its production capacity.
With major features such as the successful Despicable Me franchise and the Dr. Seuss
story The Lorax in the offing at that time, the video rendering workload to produce realistic
animated effects were considerable. In order to meet the rapidly growing demand that the
ambitious production schedule placed on the storage infrastructure, the company needed to
address the disconnect between the number of spindles in its storage network, the volume of
work, and the performance. It also wanted to pursue a vendor agnostic approach to ensure it
could satisfy the production needs without being locked into one manufacturer.
Bruno Mahe, head of technology at Illumination Mac Guff, considered several solutions to
solve these problems and ultimately chose Avere Systems FXT Edge Series filers. It was not
only the increased throughput that the Avere solution offered—solving the I/O problem without adding more spindles—but also the real-time visual analysis that the system provided.
“It was the analytics software’s ability to show where the hot data lies within the storage
system as a whole that really impressed me,” Mahe said. “I didn’t know before we did
testing that it would be such a tremendous help to production. It was one of the things that
sealed the deal.”
Avere’s Partner-led Approach
When it came to installation, French reseller NewNet was called in as the storage
specialist that had introduced the existing Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) BlueArc storage
arrays to Illumination Mac Guff. The VAR worked with Avere to fine tune the system and
balance the workloads placed on the storage.
Before the installation of the FXT Edge nodes, the HDS array was under tremendous
strain, especially during the day when the team of artists were busy weaving storylines into
keyframes, and the 15,000-core rendering farm was churning away to render the finegrained, subtle details of light, shade and movement to bring the images to life.
After the NewNet team and Avere experts completed their installation, the system was
brought online and there was a dramatic change. Chic McGregor, EMEA, sales director at
Avere, commented, “The effect was immediate. Before we had deployed our devices, there
were multiple flashing lights indicating heavy disk utilization, but afterward there were only
occasional blinks from the HDS drives because we’d offloaded so much I/O from them to
the Avere system.”
Analyzing the Problem
The next stage was to get the loading right to create the most
efficient balance between the differing requirements of the artists
and the rendering processes.
storage, which will be a cheaper, slower tier of storage. He now feels
that the existing array could be replaced—but that depends on what
the storage company’s next move may be.
“The artists were using less resources storage-wise than the rendering
farm, but they were more sensitive to resource contention. If they
had to wait half a second to access the storage array, it would create
a huge productivity issue. On the other hand, a 24-hour rendering
process wouldn’t be affected too much if it took a few milliseconds
more to gain access to a texture file,” said Mahe. Positioning the FXT
edge devices in front of the storage arrays meant the FXT cluster
could see everything passing across the network.
Avere FXT Edge filers are built using RAM and solid state drives
(SSDs), as well as high speed hard disk drives (HDDs), employing
automatic tiering across both the Edge filer cluster and other vendors’
storage arrays or core filers. This accelerates performance and offers
the opportunity to reduce costs. As the number of network-attached
storage arrays increase, they are seen as a single, self-contained
logical unit by the Avere management system and from the clients’
viewpoints.
The analytics software played a major role by visualizing the flow
and instantly highlighting where I/O contention bottlenecks were
occurring. Rather than trawling through columns of figures, relying
purely on experience, and playing hunches, the installers could see
an I/O profile, allowing them to apply their skills more efficiently.
This sped up a successful implementation by eliminating trial and
error processes, saving time and money.
Mahe said: “Avere helped diagnose where the issues lay in our storage
infrastructure, whether it was in the storage stack, in the network or
elsewhere.”
Prior to Illumination deploying Avere, there had been a network
connectivity problem with the HDS equipment. Mahe said there
had been no way to isolate such an important part of the network to
investigate the problem without interrupting work.
The diagnosis and resolution took two weeks and involved building a
“sandbox” to reproduce the problem to allow access to the data flow
without interrupting the daily production processes.
“If we had Avere and its analysis tools at that time, the two week
problem would have been resolved in two minutes by just looking at
the GUI,” he said.
Solid Solution for Cost-cutting
The offloading of the I/O from the disk system to the FXT Edge
filers has resulted in a cost savings by avoiding frequent upgrades
to the storage system. Before Avere, every time the storage array
disks reached capacity, new high-performance storage hardware
had to be purchased. The balance between operational SAS drives
and near-line disks for archiving also had to be adjusted. Now that
the Avere solution is in place, they take care of the I/O and the only
change in the hard drive storage Mahe has planned is for near-line
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Flash of Inspiration
Illumination Mac Guff depends upon a tiered storage approach for
its data strategy. Even when a film has been released, the company
has to keep movie data in near-line storage to facilitate requests for
promotional material.
This has led the company to track Avere’s development of its
FlashMove and FlashMirror capabilities with great interest. Mahe
explained, “Right now, when we move files externally between
storage tiers, we have HDS for the main production, another storage
vendor for near-line archive, and then there’s an even slower system
for static files. The best tool we have had is the HDS duplication
feature. It’s great, it’s reliable, and it’s fast, but we can only use
it with HDS equipment. Avere FlashMove and FlashMirror offer
alternatives to this as they are a vendor agnostic replication toolset.”
Overall, Mahe says that he could never go back to the old system
of adding additional disks to a traditional storage system to scale
performance, it just would not work and it’s cost prohibitive. He now
has a working environment that suits all the players, plus the ability
to see everything that is happening within the storage environment
through the analytics capability provided by Avere—a real bonus.
“We used I/O profiling before, which was client based, but we
didn’t have the overview of the complete storage network that Avere
has given us, which is proving to be exceptionally helpful. It has
shown us hot spots in real-time, which has been a major help with
production. Now we have this real-time looking glass, which does
not impact production and that’s of great value.”
The improved performance of Avere’s FXT Edge modules and the
ability to continually monitor and adjust throughput using the visual
analysis tools has resulted in a significant increase of throughput for
Illumination Mac Guff for a relatively small expenditure outlay.
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