JetStor Delivers Performance Needed for High-definition, 3D Film Production

Evergreen Studios is a visionary production company that finances and develops premium content and builds narrative worlds for theatrical, television, comics, web, mobile, and video game platforms. The Los Angeles-based company is best known for its unique development skills, proprietary technical offerings, and utilization of emerging technologies to advance its production process and storytelling capabilities. Evergreen works with some of the most renowned creative talents in the entertainment industry to extend the consumer experience and tell stories beyond their native platforms. It has also produced several television shows for Discovery Channel and Syfy and most recently, Evergreen joined forces with 20th Century Fox for the 2013 animated feature film, Walking with Dinosaurs, which revitalized the BBC franchise.

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Evergreen Studios met its needs and then some by replacing its legacy, mid-tier storage products with JetStor platforms. At any given time, the production company stores about half a petabyte of video and multimedia data on its seven JetStor RAID arrays, consuming only half their total capacity.Key for Evergreen Studios is the performance that the JetStor chassis delivers. It found that they can provide throughput of up to one gigabyte per second and the JetStor SAS 724F RAID Array, which is provisioned with ultra-fast solid-state drives (SSDs), can hit speeds of two gigabytes per second. The production company intended to use the arrays for offline work, but the systems deliver enough speed for online editing as well.“Although our JetStor solutions are far less costly than our high-end storage, we ended up using them in the same way,” explained Jamie. “We’re just as comfortable with the JetStor arrays for editing and post-production work as we are with our enterprise-class systems. This is true of even 3D content.”Additionally, the JetStor platforms are nearly as reliable as Evergreen’s top-tier storage solutions. Moreover, the JetStor chassis are provisioned with off-the-shelf, third-party drives whereas the high-end systems require expensive, proprietary drives that must be ordered from the vendor. Consequently, the production company can afford to keep spare drives for its JetStor arrays should one need to be replaced.“When we need a new drive for our enterprise storage, the system could be in a degraded state for days if not a week while we await a replacement, which is scary,” said Jamie. “Not so with our JetStor solutions. Their downtime is minimal and I can service them myself, which is a big plus. Getting this rapid replacement time from our enterprise vendor would mean paying a lot more for elevated support.”Jamie adds that the drives on the JetStor chassis are hot-swappable. He simply inserts a new drive and the platform automatically rebuilds the data.“I like the JetStor way of doing business,” said Jamie. “The upfront investment is much less, as are the operational costs. They deliver a strong price per gigabyte of storage without compromising performance or availability.”

Evergreen Studios deploys its JetStor systems in a robust storage area network (SAN). It installed four JetStor SAS 742F 42-bay FC RAID Arrays that are provisioned with either three or four terabyte drives. These are particularly high-density, power-efficient platforms. The company also uses two JetStor SAS 716F 16-bay RAID Arrays with three terabyte drives, and one JetStor SAS 724F 24-bay FC RAID Array with SSDs. All have dual power supplies and all but the JetStor 724F platform are configured for RAID 5. Each device has redundant 8 gigabits per second Fibre Channel links to two Brocade 5300 SAN switches.The production company uses the RAID Manager application to configure and administer its JetStor solutions. RAID Manager helps to reduce downtime by emailing administrators with alerts of any issues, enabling prompt servicing.

JETSTOR

JetStor meets the evolving needs for data storage, protection, and management. We leverage leading technologies to offer high-value solutions for NAS, SANs, clouds, and hyper-converged infrastructures (HCIs).  Since 1994, our customers have spanned virtually every industry, and range from Fortune 500 enterprises to small and medium-sized firms.  We support environments from data centers and clouds to branch offices and remote sites.