French Animation House Illumination Mac Guff Increases Film Output

Avere Systems, Inc. is helping SASU Illumination Mac Guff, the French animation studio behind major features such as Despicable Me franchise and the Dr. Seuss story The Lorax, accelerate its visual effects work.

Illumination Mac Guff, owned by Hollywood-based Illumination Entertainment since 2011, needed to increase output in order to meet a growing production schedule. The company was challenged with improving the performance of its storage network to meet the increased workload. It also wanted to pursue a vendor agnostic approach to ensure it could satisfy present and future production needs without being locked into one manufacturer.

Illumination Mac Guff considered several solutions and chose Avere. Its FXT Edge Series filers not only increased storage throughput to meet the company’s workload and performance challenges, but also provided real-time visual analysis of its complex application and storage environment.

“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,” explains Bruno Mahe, head of technology, Illumination Mac Guff. “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.“

The offload of I/O from the disk-based storage array to the FXT Edge filers has also resulted in a cost savings by avoiding frequent upgrades to the storage system. Before Avere, every time the storage array disks reached capacity, new performance storage hardware had to be purchased.

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. He now has a storage environment that can produce double the amount of work in the same amount of time, plus gained the ability to see everything that is happening within the storage environment through the analytics capability provided by Avere .

“The ability to increase movie production with a smarter, more economical storage architectural design has a direct impact on the bottom line,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO, Avere. “Avere is excited to be able to help Illumination Mac Guff scale its business to new heights.“