NAB: Film Creative Studio Framestore Deployed PixStor in London, New York, and Los Angeles

Pixit Media Ltd, in storage solutions for media workflows, announced that Oscar, Emmy, and British Academy award-winning film creative studio Framestore Ltd has deployed its PixStor software-defined scale-out storage solution at its Los Angeles, LA, London, UK, and New York, NY, sites as central production storage for the advertising part of its business.

The deployment gives Framestore guaranteed performance and consistency across the three sites, a cost-effective and simplified approach to DR and BC, and a modular infrastructure easy to manage and expand to support multiple workflows.

“We’ve tried many flavours of NAS and SAN offerings, and we were really impressed with Pixit Media’s PixStor. It provides speed and QoS while giving us the freedom to purchase our own hardware,” said Beren Lewis, Framestore’s global head of integrated advertising technology. “With PixStor, we get exactly the right balance of everything we need – guaranteed performance, the ability to control hardware costs, and the reassurance that we have a partner that really understands our workflow and applications – all in a model that we can easily reproduce globally.“

Renowned for its post-production and visual effects work on blockbusters such as Gravity, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and movies in the Marvel franchise, Framestore is also behind the advertising campaigns for brands such as Intel Corp., Stella Artois, BMW, and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Seeking to push the boundaries of what is possible from available technology, Framestore chose PixStor to meet the exhausting demands of its current commercial-production workflow, and also to grow and adapt with the business and its expansion plans.

PixStor offers a fast and integrated storage platform for media workflows, with flexible scalability and predictable performance that works with hardware of the customer’s choosing.

In Framestore’s case, the solution combines Pixit Media’s media expertise and file-system tools with hardware components, such as NetApp E-Series storage arrays and network infrastructure from Mellanox Technologies Ltd for the back-end storage network. Each sites uses multiple NetApp E-Series E5660 storage arrays with a mixture of 10,000rpm SAS drives and larger-capacity SATA drives, for a total of about 500TB of usable storage per site.

E-Series is the storage array preferred by many post houses and broadcasters because it is a production storage array with 99.999% reliability. Large broadcast production workgroups and boutique 4K facilities, which have zero tolerance for dropped frames, rely on E-Series. Operations can choose between RAID resiliency schemes, including dynamic disk pools that reduce disk rebuild time, provide more consistent performance, and eliminate the need for hot or cold spares. Use of flash in hybrid arrays optimizes support for ancillary transcoding and rendering workflows. ‘Phone-home’ features alert NetApp of potential disk failures before a HDD fails, allowing the vendor or systems integrator to replace the drive without any impact on the production workgroup.

With the PixStor systems online in three locations, Framestore is next planning to take advantage of the solution’s built-in intelligent sync tools to implement fast disk-to-disk copy for DR and BC.

“We’ve earned our customers’ trust through our consultative approach, proven technical competence, and added value,” said Ben Leaver, CEO, Pixit Media. “The fact that Framestore is one of those customers is significant because it is one of the largest and most prestigious companies in the industry. This deployment is a real endorsement of what we offer the market.“