Deluxe Australia partnered with Panasas to enhance its visual effects (VFX) workflows for major film productions, leveraging the Panasas ActiveStor 14 and PanFS parallel file system to create a more efficient digital artistry environment. This solution enabled faster VFX delivery, optimized the distributed render farm, and minimized rendering downtime, resulting in increased productivity among artists. The implementation proved beneficial as metadata access accelerated, eliminating performance bottlenecks and allowing artists to focus on their creative tasks.

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SUMMARY
CUSTOMER
Deluxe Australia
INDUSTRY
Media and Entertainment
Challenge
• Speed up VFX workflows
• Optimize Digital Artists’ Time and
Creativity
• Optimize Distributed Render Farm
Performance
• Gain Linear Scalability
• Finding an Easy-to-Manage solution
Solution
• Panasas®
ActiveStor®
14
• PanFS®
Parallel File System
Result
• VFX Delivered Faster
• Distributed Render Farm Optimized
• No More “Out of Hours” Rendering
• Happy, Productive Digital Artists
SUCCESSSTORY:DeluxeAustraliaINDUSTRY:Mediaandentertainment
As Deluxe Australia geared up for major
feature film productions like The Great
Gatsby and Fury Road, it turned to Panasas
and ActiveStor 14 to form the storage
foundation for its Visual Effects (VFX)
workflow. Creating VFX is digital artistry,
technically complex and aesthetically
demanding. It relies on an infrastructure
which includes powerful workstations, high
performance network attached storage
(NAS) and a large render farm to produce
visually compelling, multilayered effects.
The VFX Challenge
The Deluxe IT team supports 50 VFX artists
using CentOS-based workstations running
dual Xeon E5645 hex core CPUs or dual
Xeon E5-2665 CPUs with 24 to 32GB of
memory. Those artists use powerful anima-
tion software like Houdini from Side Effect
and Autodesk’s Maya to design 2D and 3D
VFX which are then rendered with Pixar’s
Renderman.
Creating 2D and 3D VFX generates large
numbers of files. For 2D VFX, Deluxe cre-
ates approximately 30 versions of each VFX
shot. For a 3D effect, the norm is about 50
versions per shot. The company anticipates
it will generate between 50 and 70 million
files on its current project.
VFX image files can also be sizeable. Cache
files for 3D with the particle information
can range up to 3GB, and there can be mil-
lions of these files in flight during creation
and render. These large numbers of large
concurrently active files can expose costly
performance bottlenecks very quickly.
“We needed fast, scalable, easily managed
storage to feed those workstations in a
tapeless, shared storage, file-based work-
flow and to keep the render farm operating
at maximum processor utilization,” Michael
Roperti, head of production at Deluxe
Australia, explained.
The Distributed Rendering
Challenge
Renderman is a software package for
network distributed rendering of complex
three dimensional views. Deluxe runs
Renderman on CentOS distributed across
an 80 node render farm built on dual Xeon
E5-2620 hex cores or X5650 hex cores with
32 to 48GB of system memory.
Rendering complex VFX can take hours,
days, weeks, months, or years on a single
computer, depending on the complexity,
detail and size of the individual images. For
animation, the frame rate and total dura-
tion of the animated sequence can also
greatly extend the total render time.
The rendering process can be accelerated
by subdividing tasks, individual frames or
sections of images into “pixel patches” and
distributing the calculation of each patch
across the render farm. There are two
reasons for using distributed rendering—
it’s faster and the number of concurrent
DELUXE AUSTRALIA
Panasas®
ActiveStor®
14 Helps Make Movies Better
Deluxe Australia is a leading provider of services and technologies to the worldwide
entertainment industry including top Hollywood studios. For nearly a century, Deluxe
has provided content owners and creators with the tools and talent they need to
bring the most compelling and exciting stories to life. Deluxe specializes in production,
post-production, distribution, and asset management.

2. SUCCESSSTORY:DeluxeAustraliaINDUSTRY:MEDIAandentertainment
© 2013 Panasas, Inc. All rights reserved. Panasas, the Panasas logo, ActiveStor, PanFS and DirectFlow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panasas, Inc., in the U.S.
and/or other countries. All other trademarks, registered trademarks, trade names, company names and service marks are the respective properties of their holders.
The Result
ActiveStor 14 is a particularly good fit for
Media and Entertainment (M&E) environ-
ments because metadata is served on SSD,
which can be up to 1000 times faster than
spinning media and therefore very effec-
tive at improving overall performance. The
benefit is immediately noted by VFX artists
who do not have to wait for their files to
upload to their workstations or to save
their work.
“I love how easy ActiveStor was to install.
When it arrived, we opened the box and
had it up and running in just a few hours.
It was very close to ‘plug-and-play’,”
Roperti added.
Another plus for M&E applications is that
ActiveStor supports a global namespace.
The entire configured capacity of the
solution is presented as a single, very large
volume. Deluxe does not need to have ded-
icated volumes to separate renders from
artists. There is no need to ‘data wrangle’
rendered frames from a separate volume.
“ActiveStor performance was so
good that it exposed previously
hidden network bottlenecks.
ActiveStor 14 is that fast, and the
Panasas team helped us debug
those problems, even though they
were ‘outside the box’ for them,”
Michael Roperti
Head of Production, Deluxe Australia
Efficient Storage Increases Productivity
“Panasas ActiveStor 14 helps us to deliver a better product, faster.
We do not have to contend with disk usage ‘busy periods’ or live
with out-of-hours renders. We no longer have idle, cranky artists,
unable to work when the render farm is hammering the storage. We
are more efficient. Our artists are now busy, happy and productive,”
—Michael Roperti, Head of Production at Deluxe Australia
renders can increase. While distributed ren-
dering benefits from scaling performance
because frames can be rendered more
quickly, it also benefits from capacity scal-
ing. Those two seemingly competing paths
create conflict in legacy storage systems
because different methods of distributing
the workload tend to favor one type of
scaling over the other.
Panasas ActiveStor and the PanFS®
parallel
file system scales in both dimensions equal-
ly well and when both performance and
capacity scale linearly, it becomes possible
to render very large images very quickly.
The Panasas Solution
Deluxe’s former storage systems were an
amalgamation of hardware RAID control-
lers, disks and enclosures. The company
was looking for a solution with better
performance and room to grow and was
also easy to manage.
“We work with file-based workflows, so file-
based storage made sense; our rendering
is distributed, so a storage solution based
on scale-out NAS and a parallel file system
seemed like a good fit, “Roperti said.
“Our evaluation process consisted of run-
ning 50 ‘disk thumping’ scripts on 30 VFX
workstations, 150 separate jobs, to beat
up the storage. The performance from
ActiveStor 14 stood head and shoulders
above offerings from other vendors. The
fully integrated parallel file system and the
intelligent use of Solid State Disk (SSD) gave
Deluxe some great results.
“We estimated that we would need about
100 spindles in other vendors’ configura-
tions to get the same throughput we were
getting during our evaluation process from
a single ActiveStor 14 shelf with 80TB
of capacity, 92GB of SSD cache and one
‘director blade’. The way the PanFS parallel
file system transparently manages metada-
ta is also pretty impressive,” he continued.
051420131107
Deluxe Australia digital artists create compelling 2D and 3D VFX with powerful workstations, leading
edge software and high performance scale out NAS from Panasas.