Cover Story

Studios take the NAS route

Studios have sophisticated storage needs that demand hundreds of terabytes of multi-tiered storage. NAS has emerged as a cost-effective option for them, says Vinutha V.

Studios that are involved in production of movies and related work face crunching deadlines and the need to juggle with multiple projects at the same time. They have to deal with the prospect of overhauling their server, storage, and networking architectures to make way for the growing wave of high-definition (HD) work. They need everything from storage-on-the-go systems for real-time editing in the field to elaborate enterprise-class storage installations. These high-powered implementations may consist of hundreds of terabytes of data and tiered-storage architectures to help move archival and backup data onto low-cost storage systems. Hence, Indian studios are using Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions for digital content creation, animation and movies production.

Evolving needs

Studios have bandwidth-hungry applications and their work is data-intensive. The requirement of storage is significantly higher for them. A 90-minute animation or video project requires about 20 terabytes of storage. Says P Krishna Prasad, Head, IT, Crest Animation Studios, “Disk-space crunch is a constant problem in an evolving 3-D studio, it needs lots of planning to handle the files in both local and central storage. Also the efficiency and performance of storage is directly related to the productivity of projects and deadlines.”

Each frame in a movie, there are 24 per second, goes through a slew of processes from pre-production-to-post-production; storyboards, modelling, rigging, texturing, props, backgrounds, lighting, animation, rendering, compositing and online finishing. In each of these stages, files are created. When a scene file reaches rendering, it should be around 80MB to 150MB and each episode will have about 200 or more scene files. Once the scenes are rendered, frames are created with an average size of 2.2MB each. “All the data is stored centrally in a high-performance storage system. Typically a 3-D studio consists of a central storage where multiple projects and users can access the data to create the graphics output. The central storage should be a high-performance system and should not have a single-point of failure within. Also it needs a strong backup media device with good throughput,” adds Prasad.

Digital assets

In a digital studio, storage plays an important role. High resolution digital content is the most important asset that these [studios] companies have—and it is important to protect it, and ensure that the storage that houses the data provides excellent performance to complement the rest of the infrastructure. Additionally, the industry is growing rapidly and that aspect has to be taken care of. Shailesh Agarwal, Country Manager, IBM Storage, IBM India says, “Since each image is a large file (size), storage requirements for creating a movie sequence can be quite high. If the studio is working on parallel projects, management of all the storage needs can be strenuous. Upon completion of the project, it is important to devise a mechanism to safely archive data so that the constituent parts can be reused.”

"NAS plays a key role in the movie-making or animation industry due to its ability to facilitate collaboration and sharing" - Manish Bapat National Manager NAS and CAS Technologies India and SAARC Region EMC

With respect to archiving the files, tapes have been the media of choice and continue to remain so even now. In today’s studio, especially in the edit and broadcast space, competition is the key. “With tape-based archives, searching for older data becomes cumbersome and results in more physical storage space which at times goes beyond control. Further, it demands an ability to have an active archive of the older media files so that if required, intelligent software can pull out the files on the fly and make them available to the editing teams and enable them create programmes for an event,” says Manish Bapat, National Manager, NAS and CAS Technologies, India and SAARC Region, EMC.

Animation needs NAS

In the animation industry, work is accomplished through multiple terminals and access from a common pool of storage is high. “There is a need for more computing power and storage of huge amounts of data—storing, re-using and modifying it. The performance has to be good as the turnaround time is short and these computer-intensive applications need a scale-out architecture. All such needs are largely driven by NAS,” says Soumitra Agarwal, Marketing Director, NetApp India.

Most applications in the animation industry are of the look-up-and-read type, which mean they require lot of writing, re-writing and searches. Pramod Dhaval J, Senior Technology Manager, Prana Studios says, “Since we require dynamic storage solutions, NAS suits our requirements. NAS boxes can help customise applications on the fly without any hassles and in addition, can be seamlessly integrated without any downtime.” Whereas Storage Area Network (SAN) is rigid and complex and needs a shut-down if the studio decides to shift or migrate to another application. Same is the case with expansion; the animation industry cannot afford downtime. While NAS is a simple and flexible solution that comes in a box, SAN is associated with network and switches and the entire topology changes with upgradation or migration.

In movie-making, each frame is divided into various layers; background, lighting, and characters. So there is a team working on each one of these aspects and then these are all assembled together for one frame. Many such frames make one sequence and multiple sequences form the overall movie. Therefore, there is a need for collaborative file-sharing. “More often than not, it is the NAS technology that plays a key role in the movie-making or animation industry due to its ability to facilitate collaboration and sharing. NAS allows the creation of contents by various team members which is then rendered by the rendering farm consisting of hundreds of blades,” adds Bapat.

While SAN has always been the ‘logical’ answer for all ‘determinist’ performance requirements, the media industry typically works on collaborative file-sharing that gives rise to the need for NAS. In NAS, the performance is not really as ‘determinist’ at all times since it works on the standard IP network. One workstation initiating a huge data transfer can result in the network getting clogged and the overall response time dipping. Even if SAN is considered, it may be found economically unviable because of its huge fabric of network consisting of Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (FC HBA), FC Switches and so on.

“If a particular studio is growing and getting more complex work then the rendering farm needs to access files faster. For instance, if 100 servers are trying to access files through a NAS header it will become a bottleneck, so it’s better to go for a combination of SAN, NAS and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI),” explains Prasad.

Growing opportunities

"Customers upload digital source data of characters and backgrounds to enable the process of rendering into final frames" - Avijit Basu Country Manager, Marketing Enterprise Servers and Storage Technology Solutions Group Hp India Sales

3-D animation and utility rendering services have entered the mainstream. Avijit Basu, Country Manager, Marketing, Enterprise Servers and Storage, Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales says, “Customers [studios] upload digital source data of characters and backgrounds to enable the computationally-intensive process of rendering into final frames. In the future, we would have concepts like pay for the services and compute resources. It would also lead to better IT security—confidence in utility-computing for secure storage, and each user would have an unique cryptographic key for access.”

Various studios in India are looking at constructing their infrastructure on the Digital Media Framework (DMF) that IBM has proposed. “This is a framework that has many components focussing on various aspects of the industry such as content creation, content management and content-rendering. Storage forms an integral part of the solution. As the Indian animation market is growing we see the storage opportunity flourishing in this industry,” adds Agarwal of IBM.

EMC believes that the animation industry would provide a huge opportunity for storage. As the industry matures, there would be a spurt in the adoption of latest storage technologies. Adoption of technologies like MPFSi (Multiple File System for iSCSI) or equivalent will find increasing demand due to performance reasons. Faster time to market will create the need for reuse of old animation creations, which will demand active archiving technologies like CAS (Content Addressed Storage). “The animation industry in India is in a budding stage and the current storage requirement predominantly is NAS. Once the industry matures with an increasing number of projects, SAN solutions will see widespread adoption,” comments Dhaval on a concluding note.