Media and Entertainment

There are a series of complex work flows in the media and entertainment world. Film is shot on cameras, digitized, and passed on to editors. Editors take the relevant film input and feed it into a process that includes other media – such as animation, video effects, audio, audio effects, and character generation – then it is laid on a timeline and eventually rendered to create the desired synthesized product. Editors make their decisions using purpose-built clients and generally rely upon powerful server clusters to render, create complex composites, and eventually conform. The I/O patterns can vary greatly. While much of the edit files are large, there can be many small files, such as texture files that editors make use of. The ANX 1500 provides distinct advantages in media and entertainment environments:

• Improving client performance and workflow acceleration. Editors and artists are often reading from the same files. Editing stations may contain sufficient system memory to store a large percentage of the file working set. To ensure that stale data isn’t inadvertently included in an editor’s work, the client will initiate NFS metadata requests to check if data stored on the NAS has been modified. Metadata processing can consume a great deal of CPU resource on the NAS and can be more expensive from a latency and throughput perspective if the metadata must be retrieved from disk. The ANX 1500 is capable of processing over 2 million NFS metadata operations per second with very low latency. The ANX 1500 can be used for caching NFS metadata such as symbolic links. This can provide the ability to create a Global Namespace, providing users with access to global directory structure and making their lives easier.
• Accelerating access to files accessed by multiple users. The ANX 1500 accelerates payload data placed in its caches. An example would be texture files accessed by a number of users. Edits and workflows, including renderings, can be accelerated without relying upon massive numbers of disk drives. Fewer burdens are placed on the NAS enabling it to scale performance over more clients.
• Saving tremendous amounts of capital, power, space, and cooling expenses. By offloading the NAS, far fewer disk drives are required, NAS controllers can scale to support more users and administrators spend less time scaling NAS infrastructure.