Pure Storage, the IT company providing data storage technology and services, has announced that Cumulus VFX, a premium visual effects (VFX) provider, is leveraging FlashBlade, Pure Storage's unified fast file and object platform. This will help the company manage ever-growing data demands, achieve enhanced security, and minimize its data centre's environmental impact, all supporting its growth into a leading global VFX provider.
Cumulus VFX, a VFX provider having worked with the likes of Netflix and Foxtel, has grown rapidly since its founding in 2010, gaining a global reputation for quality and reliability in the VFX world.
Visual effects are at the centre of modern film production, and managing the sheer volume of information required to produce photorealistic imagery presents a growing challenge to the industry. With the rapid growth of its global client-base, Cumulus VFX faced critical storage capacity challenges, a common problem in the industry as the amount of technology and data applications continue to grow.
To manage heightened demands and ultimately support its rapid growth, Cumulus VFX turned to Pure Storage and Agile Data Services, a leading supplier of new and used enterprise IT hardware and maintenance solutions, to build a future-proof, enterprise-grade, integrated data storage environment based on FlashBlade, Pure Storage's unified fast file and object storage platform.
Cumulus VFX now operates its entire production environment on a 7x52 TB FlashBlade, including current projects for Disney, Warner Bros and Bazmark.
The benefits include improved scalability and performance. Cumulus VFX reduced the management time of applications from hours to minutes and, in some cases, even seconds with Pure Storage's RapidFile Toolkit and its advanced Linux integration. Pure also supports Cumulus VFX's management of applications like Houdini, Blender, Autodesk Maya, Silhouette FX, 3D Equalizer, and Adobe Photoshop. With improved speed and scalability, Cumulus VFX increased the number of rendering artists from 20 to 60.
Due to the nature of Cumulus VFX's business, an outage while executing massive workloads with developers could lead to catastrophe. Pure Storage enables enhanced data security, as mission-critical data can be encrypted at rest.
Pure Storage's FlashBlade, helping global organizations achieve up to 67% in direct energy savings versus competitors, enabled Cumulus VFX to minimize carbon emissions with higher rack density and improved performance.
"As an IT decision maker, there's an obligation to put the most efficient, lowest impact solutions in place across our IT environment. What Pure Storage provides in four to six units would take competitors 96 units. Pure Storage not only ticked all the performance and technical requirements, but it had the best energy footprint. Cumulus VFX's decision to move to Pure Storage FlashBlade was a no-brainer, as the company is leaps ahead of the competition," says Nicky Ladas, chief technologist at Cumulus VFX.
"The visual effects' industry has highly demanding computing requirements with tremendous volumes of unstructured data. Companies like Cumulus VFX are right on the cutting edge of innovation and are doing Australia proud. Pure is delighted to be able to support the great work that they do with our unified fast file and object platform to tame all that unstructured data," adds Amy Rushall, area vice president for ANZ at Pure Storage.
