Animation Studio Rainmaker Entertainment Uses Alacritech

Alacritech, Inc., announced that Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc. has deployed
Alacritech’s ANX 1500 NFS acceleration appliance to deliver improved
performance and extend the life of its scale-out NAS.

Without ANX 1500, Rainmaker would have been forced to purchase
additional NAS infrastructure, costing nearly 50% more in capital, and would
have faced buying more soon thereafter.

By using ANX 1500, Rainmaker increased data speeds
while taking a load off of its BlueArc Model 3210 NAS controllers. The ANX 1500 provides accelerated data caching using both the company’s
patented acceleration technology and flash memory. The appliance provides CPU
cycles by reducing the NFS traffic that would otherwise bombard the NAS.
The ANX 1500 accelerates the
performance of an existing storage network without requiring an organization to
replace its infrastructure or surrender ownership of data.

Prior to Alacritech, Rainmaker relied on a NAS structure with active
data being served by the two BlueArc Model 3210 Titan Machines. But the sheer
volume of files had increased to the point that Rainmaker could not get enough
system throughput because the processors on the BlueArc Systems Model 3210s
were maxed out, hitting nearly 100% utilization.

In November of 2011, Rainmaker started testing the ANX 1500 with actual
production jobs in a confined configuration consisting of one chassis which
included 16 servers. Rainmaker was so impressed by the performance that they
expanded the test only days later and had the ANX 1500 supporting its entire
environment (about 400 servers).

"Reducing the disk
operations per second has allowed us to stay on this generation of NAS Filer
for a longer period of time," said David Algar, principal systems administrator at Rainmaker. "The
cost was significantly lower than purchasing a third NAS Filer head with disk
cache. The implantation is simpler and requires no juggling of file systems to
balance the load."

"What is so impressive
about the Rainmaker use case is that they spent considerably less money to
achieve considerably more," said Doug Rainbolt, VP of
Marketing of Alacritech. "This
clearly demonstrates the viability of adding a performance layer architecture,
such as the ANX 1500, to compliment modern NAS capacity layer deployments. It
allows customers to get more performance out of the NAS they already have.
Decreasing response times by 80% while spending 40% less in combined Capex and
Opex, and having headroom for future expansion, is an enviable position to be
in."

"Alacritech’s proven
acceleration technology captured in silicon and software, and wrapped into the
form of a purpose built appliance, enabled Rainmaker to realize impressively
low latencies and achieve so much more than just relying on Flash alone,"
said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "More importantly, this packaging allows
storage administrators to avoid the pitfalls and headaches associated with
unnatural acts to manipulate NAS to produce IOPS and low latency."

"As we plan for
additional growth, we will definitely factor in additional ANX 1500 units,"
said Rainmaker’s Algar.