PRESS: Animation Studio Rainmaker Entertainment Uses Alacritech Anx 1500 To Boost Performance While Delaying NAS Capital Purchases: Acceleration Appliance Doubles Data Speed to 2.5GB/s from 1.16GB/s
San Jose, CA – April 24, 2012 – Alacritech, the pioneer in NFS storage acceleration, today announced that that Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc. has deployed Alacritech’s ANX 1500 Network File System (NFS) acceleration appliance to deliver improved performance and extend the life of its scale-out Network Attached Storage (NAS). Without the Alacritech ANX 1500, Rainmaker would have been forced to purchase additional NAS infrastructure, costing nearly 50% more in capital, and would have faced buying more soon thereafter.
By using Alacritech’s ANX 1500, Rainmaker dramatically increased data speeds while taking a tremendous load off of its BlueArcTM Model 3210 NAS controllers. The Alacritech ANX 1500 provides accelerated data caching using both the company’s patented acceleration technology and Flash memory. The appliance provides CPU cycles by greatly reducing the NFS traffic that would otherwise bombard the NAS. The ANX 1500 is the first and only storage product to accelerate the performance of an existing storage network without requiring an organization to replace its infrastructure or surrender ownership of data.
Prior to Alacritech, Rainmaker relied on a NAS structure with active data being served by the two BlueArc Model 3210 Titan Machines. But the sheer volume of files had increased to the point that Rainmaker could not get enough system throughput because the processors on the BlueArc Systems Model 3210s were maxed out, hitting nearly 100% utilization.
In November of 2011, Rainmaker started testing the ANX 1500 with actual production jobs in a confined configuration consisting of one chassis which included 16 servers. Rainmaker was so impressed by the performance that they expanded the test only days later and had the ANX 1500 supporting its entire environment (about 400 servers).
“Reducing the disk operations per second has allowed us to stay on this generation of NAS Filer for a longer period of time,” said David Algar, Principal Systems Administrator at Rainmaker. “The cost was significantly lower than purchasing a third NAS Filer head with disk cache. The implantation is simpler and requires no juggling of file systems to balance the load.”
“What is so impressive about the Rainmaker use case is that they spent considerably less money to achieve considerably more,” said Doug Rainbolt, Vice President of Marketing of Alacritech. “This clearly demonstrates the viability of adding a performance layer architecture, such as the ANX 1500, to compliment modern NAS capacity layer deployments. It allows customers to get more performance out of the NAS they already have. Decreasing response times by 80% while spending 40% less in combined Capex and Opex, and having headroom for future expansion, is an enviable position to be in.”
“Alacritech’s proven acceleration technology captured in silicon and software, and wrapped into the form of a purpose built appliance, enabled Rainmaker to realize impressively low latencies and achieve so much more than just relying on Flash alone,” said Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer Consulting. “More importantly, this packaging allows storage administrators to avoid the pitfalls and headaches associated with unnatural acts to manipulate NAS to produce IOPS and low latency.”
“As we plan for additional growth, we will definitely factor in additional ANX 1500 units,” said Rainmaker’s Algar.
About Rainmaker Entertainment
Rainmaker Entertainment Inc., a multifaceted animation studio, is one of Canada’s largest producers of CG animation. With an innovative history that spans over 15 years, Rainmaker today continues to tell engaging stories and create compelling characters for all media. The studio’s 200 creatively-inspired artists and storytellers are currently in development on the company’s first slate of proprietary projects. Originally established as Mainframe Entertainment, the company broke ground by producing the first ever CGI animation series ReBoot. In addition to developing its own properties, Rainmaker also produces feature length DVD’s for many top international brands including Barbie, Max Steel, Tony Hawk and more. Rainmaker’s clients include Mattel, The Weinstein Company, Lionsgate, Sony, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and MTV. For more information, go to www.rainmaker.com.
About Alacritech
Founded in 1997 by network storage pioneer Larry Boucher and group of respected storage executives, Alacritech sets new records for the delivery of increasing amounts of enterprise cloud, video and other rich application data. The company’s first NFS Acceleration appliance, the ANX 1500, mitigates Network Attached Storage (NAS) sprawl and dramatically improves the performance of NFS infrastructures, and does so without requiring the replacement of existing ecosystems or the surrender of ownership of mission-critical data. The ANX 1500 pays for itself faster than any other storage infrastructure solution and provides by far the lowest cost per operations per second (OPS). The company holds 54 patents and has received $34 million in funding from Alloy Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Berkeley International Capital Corporation, Munder Capital Management, Needham Capital Partners, and Quantum Technology Ventures. Learn more at www.alacritech.com.
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