Whiskytree Selects Avere and Arista

Avere Systems, Inc. announced that Whiskytree Inc,
a Northern California-based visual effects provider, has implemented a
clustered solution of Avere FXT 2300 appliances to scale its rendering
performance by 700 percent, while consolidating SAN and NAS data into
a single storage pool and simplifying management.

The storage fabric selected
for the render farm is based on Arista Networks, Inc.‘s 10 GbE
switches and Arista EOS switch software that provides reliability
and features for provisioning, scaling and managing networks.

Whiskytree offers visual effects, post-production, concept
art and design services. With an
emphasis on creating visual effects for major feature film projects, Whiskytree
delivers the final shots that moviegoers see in theaters and often helps
filmmakers design the content of their films. 
Its projects include work on blockbuster films such as Thor, Tron:
Legacy and Terminator Salvation, among others.

The company uses fibre-attached workstations and NAS-based
rendering as part of its workflow, building, rendering and compositing final
shots. With a growing render farm and the need to scale data fast and easily,
Whiskytree sought out a solution that could support its existing Xsan
environment and allow for a transition from SAN to NAS. The company
turned to Avere and its FXT 2300 scale-out NAS systems to
provide the performance that supports their growth.

Whiskytree also selected Arista for its 7124SX 10Gb Ethernet
switch, providing a non-blocking backbone connecting the SAN to the render
servers that more than quadruples performance and scales the amount of render
nodes needed to process increasingly sophisticated effects within the shortest
possible time frames. 

"The Avere solution made a profound difference for
Whiskytree," said Jonathan Harb, CEO of Whiskytree." With Avere we were able to improve
rendering performance by a factor of seven, which means more efficient job
processing and faster turnaround for our clients. Xsan has proven to be
bulletproof high-performance storage, but we faced special challenges when
attempting to connect more than a hundred render nodes in addition to all of
our fibre channel workstations. The traditional method of re-sharing the Xsan
for use as NAS simply did not work. Since adding our Avere FXT cluster into the
mix, we are able to fully leverage our existing Xsan environment, increase the
performance of our fibre-attached workstations, completely stabilize our
rendering pipeline, and provide a path for a future transition to an all-NAS
10GbE environment – all without breaking the bank."

"On the networking front, we needed to increase
performance to optimize the render farm’s utilization. The Arista installation was straightforward
and the performance exceeded our expectations.
We’re now looking to extend 10GbE to our production workstations to
further improve artist productivity while using standard twisted pair
cabling," said Harb.

"The need for cost-effective, high performance render
farms that are compatible with Xsan can be a challenge for VFX providers such
as Whiskytree," said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems.
"By implementing scale-out NAS appliances like the FXT 2300, Whiskytree
was able to solve its near-term limitations regarding scalability while paving
the way to achieving its vision of consolidation onto an IP based NAS
infrastructure that will grow with the company."

"The paradigms of high performance computing combining
server clusters, large file systems and high speed networks are proving their
usefulness in media and entertainment. It affordably expands a company’s throughput and capacity to deliver
increased productivity and higher quality content to their customers,"
said Doug Gourlay, VP Marketing of Arista Networks.

The Avere FXT Series of scale-out NAS
appliances is a solution to deliver the benefits of performance
tiering and scale-out clustering to any NAS environment. Avere FXT appliances
define a new NAS services product offering, providing NAS
functionality to both existing and new NAS deployments and both single-vendor
and heterogeneous NAS environments.