European Visual Effects Company BlueBolt Selecting Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc. has been chosen by BlueBolt Ltd, a visual effects (VFX) firm, to manage its growing enterprise storage needs.

Founded in 2009, BlueBolt has grown into one of London’s respected boutique VFX organisations. It has provided the visual effects for many productions including BBC’s Great Expectations (BAFTA Winner), Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom, the Emmy award winning TV show Game of Thrones (Season One) along with being part of multiple vendors on a sections of shots on Pirates of the Caribbean, The Fast and The Furious, and the Oscar-winning 007 movie Skyfall.

An adaptive storage solution that can manage the growing workload of BlueBolt’s creative and technical staff is imperative to keep up with the evolving demands in the industry. As with any business where data is mission critical to its operations, it is vital that BlueBolt can rely on its storage solution to deliver performance. It must also have the ability to grow with the demands of the company, whilst remaining cost effective.

Working with Escape Technologies Ltd, BlueBolt selected Nexenta’s SDS solution to centralise and manage its storage infrastructure and replace the various storage platforms it had in place. Collaborating with its technology partner, Dell, Inc., to provide the hardware, and utilising the open-source ZFS-based OS, BlueBolt implemented a two node HA cluster with 144TB of raw NexentaStor capacity, which provides 68TB useable capacity. The entire solution is designed to manage its ever-growing data needs.

“The amount of critical data we are creating at BlueBolt is always growing. Data loss or system failure would be unacceptable. We needed to implement a secure, reliable, scalable storage solution and chose Nexenta because of its growing reputation in the visual effects community,” said George Siddiqui, CTO, BlueBolt. “We now have peace of mind that our storage can cope with our workloads. Nexenta has all of the features we would expect from an enterprise storage platform while remaining one of the most cost-effective solutions on the market.“

Jacco Van Achterberg, sales director, Nexenta, said: “Our SDS offering is perfectly suited to the media space, where large files need to be easily accessible at the touch of a button. We pride ourselves on stepping away from the Massively Expensive Storage Systems (MESS) provided by larger vendors and work in partnership with our customers to make sure the solution they implement is the best fit for them. We are delighted that BlueBolt has chosen to implement a future-proof SDS solution to support it as it grows.“