DigitalFilm Tree Using Excelero NVMesh

Excelero Storage Ltd. said that DigitalFilm Tree (DFT), a creative firm to the media, tech and entertainment companies, has empowered its creatives through better storage by using its NVMesh software as the centerpiece of a new storage architecture.

In a business that is constantly asked for insane turnaround times, DFT found that using Elastic NVMe from Excelero afforded its team and their clients more time for quality editorial, and numerous time and hassle, saving storage performance improvements over its previous traditional solution.

“The first time I saw Excelero’s software, it was so different it was shocking,” said Thomas Galyon, CTO, DFT. “After testing and deploying it, I’ve learned it’s even better. Excelero will let us store any file format we throw at it, and run on any server, with 10x faster render processing and at least 100x greater total aggregate bandwidth than our previous software. The added bandwidth lets us send project content out to clients far faster. NVMesh has become the backbone of our facilities.“

“There’s simply nothing we’ve asked of our Excelero-based storage system that it hasn’t been able to handle,” he continued. “With its elastic NVMe capabilities on board, I’m looking forward to a world where frankly I never have to think about storage speeds again.“

Storage can never run fast enough with the colorization and visual effects work done by DFT and its clients, and at its extreme volumes, seemingly routine tasks can become bottlenecks. When a planned infrastructure upgrade brought an evaluation of its storage and networking approaches, DFT knew a change was in order to the superior performance and cost-effectiveness of NVMe flash. It also decided vs. using FC where an upgrade meant sizable cost increases, for minimal if any performance gain.

“With Excelero storage software behind an 8K DPX sequence, we got close to line speed – something I don’t even expect – and playback that was buttery smooth. That was the ‘Aha!” moment,” Galyon said. “There’s currently no file format Excelero couldn’t handle efficiently and deliver to our workstations. And that was just in phase one.“

NVMesh’s software-defined distributed block storage for HPC workloads empowers users through better storage. Customers benefit from shared NVMe resources across the network, access to remove NVMe at local speed – and performance that exceeds the capacity limit of local flash on servers.

For example, in work for team producing Prime Rewind: Inside The Boys, a before show for season 2 of Amazon Prime video’s superhero and vigilante series The Boys, DFT’s system faced a test to its Excelero-powered storage solution. The production team needed to process 40 hours of client-uploaded dailies, back them up, make proxies for rapid editing, process and deliver them to their editorial department – in 10 hours.

“That’s where we saw the real performance difference in Excelero’s system,” said Galyon. “It was amazing how easily we handled this exceptionally demanding project with Excelero. By turning it around quickly, we afforded everyone more time for quality editorial, on an already tight time frame.“

He also appreciated NVMesh’s time-savings with load balancing, which is required by traditional SANs and that NVMesh makes virtually non-existent.