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Hello, my name is Chris Healer and I am CEO of a company called The Molecule
We are based in New York and Los Angeles and we do motion graphics visual effects
and other bits and bobs of post production
which creates
an extraordinary need for
high-availability of large quantities of data
When we first started about
8 years ago
it wasn't uncommon for a TV episode to have maybe 20 shots in it
20 visual effects shots and that's
probably HD camera, probably 8-bit
each file uncompressed is probably 8MB at 1920 x 1080
So 20 shots, alright, you've got
a few hundred frames on a disk and everybody needs to get at it
I mean you make work on those things for
a few weeks to a month
and it was difficult
You're working on single processor machines Gigabit Ethernet was just coming out
HD cam was just starting to take hold
of the industry at that point
and that's where we were at Now, 8 years later
instead of doing 20 shots in 3 weeks
we do 200 shots every single week
and we do them in full floating point color space in 4K, 5K
sometimes in stereo
Longer shots, instead of
5 people working in a room
it's 25 people working in a room
Now it's not uncommon for a TV episode to have over 200 visual effect shots
and you might have a week
5 or 6 working days to complete that
which means you got to get 25 artists all in the same place
accessing the same data
while it's rendering on some other process
Currently we have about
300 or 400 processors rendering material while 25
artists are accessing it at the same time
and frequently
once you include
back plates and CG material and everything else a particular shot might be
10GBs in and
300MBs out
so times have changed.
It's not as simple as it used to be when it was 8MBs a frame in
and 8MBs a frame out
Those were the salad days
but it's a new era now We've progressed from having local storage on each
machine to having
different forms of network storage using NFS, Samba
network attached framework
and it's changed from
single Gigabit Ethernet to bonded Ethernet to
Fibre Channel
systems
and using storage attached networks
Our thirst for high speed access
to large quantities of data is unquenchable
For what we do
it's very difficult to provide a completely
homogeneous environment
as far as operating systems
class of machine
version of operating system
and because of
all the heterogeneous elements within the system
you really need a common element to tie it all together
and what the PROMISE VTrak system
provides is a storage area network where each operating system can connect
using whatever drivers are necessary
and in particular the A-Class line is very fast and very large
and suits our purposes.