Avere Solutions Deployed by Sony Pictures Imageworks

Avere Systems, in tiered NAS with its Demand-Driven Storage solutions, announced the deployment of Avere FXT Series appliances at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Since 1992, Sony Pictures Imageworks has been creating visual effects and digital character animation, beginning with seamless invisible effects and developing an expertise in emotive CG characters and creatures for live action, all CG-animated, and hybrid live-action/animation productions.

"At Imageworks, we’re always on the lookout for IT solutions that enable us to stay on the cutting edge in video production and animation," said Stephen Kowalski, Director, Systems & Storage Operations at Sony Pictures Imageworks. "We chose Avere to support our digital animation studio in Albuquerque because not only does its FXT Series deliver the IOPs the group needs without driving up operational costs, its two-stage NAS architecture allows us the flexibility to work with a multitude of mass storage systems. Now we can choose whichever solution best suits our changing needs without worrying about being limited by a single vendor’s architecture."

With Avere’s FXT Series, business demand for rapid data access is met by storing active client data on a cluster of high-performance FXT appliances. The FXT moves inactive data to a legacy NAS file server, or mass storage system, that is optimized for capacity and data retention.  System performance scales linearly by adding additional appliances to the FXT cluster and capacity scales by adding disk storage to the NAS file server or mass storage system.  Decoupling storage network performance from the disk capacity available enables Avere to deliver enterprise-class application performance while slashing CAPEX acquisition costs by almost 70% and ongoing OPEX expenditures by a 5:1 ratio on average.

"The Avere FXT gives Sony Imageworks the ability to deploy high-performance NAS to employees located in our digital animation studio in New Mexico at a reasonable cost and with minimal administration," said Nick Bali, Sr. Software Engineer, Systems R&D, Sony Pictures Imageworks. "The FXT architecture is perfect for giving these employees the ability to access network files here at headquarters with a dramatic reduction in overall latency, making some users believe we moved the entire mass storage system to Albuquerque."