MelroseTEC Helps Sim With Excelero NVMe Storage Software for Production/Post-Production Storage Solution

MelroseTEC, the professional services division of Melrose, Inc., announced that it helped Sim to enter a new era in production/post-production ease and efficiency with a performance storage architecture based on Excelero Ltd.‘s shared NVMe storage software.

By combining MelroseTEC commodity NVMe hardware with NVMesh elastic NVMe block storage software and Mellanox 25/40/50/100GbE NICs, Sim is able to deliver up to 11GB/s of storage bandwidth per client to support four simultaneous 4K 60FPS Open EXR streams. This additional storage performance allows Sim to power its creative and future-proof its data centre during an era of industry change.

Post-production studios are struggling to keep up with the rapid increase in both resolution and colour fidelity. The current normal is 4K-10bit, 4K-16bit is becoming commonplace, and 8K is just over the horizon. Open EXR, and ACES along with uncompressed clip-based workflows are now happening as well. This taxes existing disk-based systems beyond their capability, requiring a new approach to storage.

Sim, having filled its show roster of work using such large file formats, needed additional high-performance storage. It turned to Melrose as a partner to engineer a solution based on the technology of NVMe.

“We were extremely impressed with the level of technology and speed that Excelero’s software with NVMe hardware has presented to Sim – offering us six times faster performance than our existing storage network,” said Paul Chapman, VP, engineering and technology/LA, Sim.

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Software-defined architecture
Newer NVMe SSDs are increasingly the go-to solution when studios and their customers need streaming, editing, and finishing in high frame rates. Excelero NVMesh SDS solution enables workstation and server access to large scalable bandwidth and low latency performance to meet these needs. Its NVMesh provides a scale out solution for 4K frame-based Colour and Finish workflows and beyond. Based on 4 independent servers, with 6 NVMe disks per node, native Linux based clients can expect 11GB/s over 100GbE. Windows and Mac clients are able to achieve up to 2.5Gb over 25GbE.

Benefits of Excelero with NVMe throughput and low latency storage:

• Reduces infrastructure costs by 50% utilising 100GbE

• Unleash the performance of NVMe, which is 5-35x the performance of legacy SSD and HDD

• Minimise changes to workflows by combining with existing storage hardware to use NVMe as tier-0

• Future-proof with any number of streams, any resolution, any frame rate

Sandy Nasseri, CEO, Melrose, says: “Our professional services division MelroseTEC, partners with our customers to offer customized technology solutions that create and/or improve, our customers’ technological infrastructure. Our expert team of 15 engineers build, test and validate proofs-of-concept for every proposed workflow. MelroseTEC creating the Excelero NVMesh system enabled Sim to use a hardware agnostic approach, which helped drive down costs.“

Liam Ford, SVP, post engineering, Sim, says: “Excelero with NVMe met our needs in paving the way for our transition to an ethernet based infrastructure.“

Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder, Excelero, says: “Today’s production workflows need to evolve to meet the far greater demands of new content formats. We’re delighted to partner with MelroseINC and Sim International to provide Elastic NVMe storage with high throughput and low latency storage that content creators need – helping them drive down costs and gain greater flexibility, and keep delivering better, more realistic, more impressive viewing experiences.“