DataDirect Networks (DDN) has announced that the Ringling College of Art and Design has deployed 1.6PB of DDN storage. By relying on DDN’s SFA high-performance storage as the foundation of a powerful, unified content creation and storage platform, the company claims that this will allow students to push the boundaries of computer-generated graphics, resulting in more visually compelling content.
DataDirect Networks (DDN) has announced that the Ringling College of Art and Design has deployed 1.6PB of DDN storage. By relying on DDN’s SFA high-performance storage as the foundation of a powerful, unified content creation and storage platform, the company claims that this will allow students to push the boundaries of computer-generated graphics, resulting in more visually compelling content.
With the high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, combined with DDN storage to streamline the entire content lifecycle of their creative projects, students are able build more engaging creations such as advertising, computer animation, digital filmmaking, and game design. Ringling College renders tens of thousands of frames all the while managing hundreds of other projects, which generates 1.6PBs of storage that requires a comprehensive, highly reliable, large-scale data management infrastructure to support digital content creation and collaboration. As such, the college deployed a pair of DDN SFA systems with the ZFS file system, which allows students to store digital content in individual home spaces that they had readily access to, no matter what the platform is, or where it's located.
With this DDN storage and compute environment, the college can render 2.8 million frames in one week, indicating that it would have otherwise taken 89 years to complete on a high-end workstation. In addition, with DDN’s IOPS and bandwidth performance, students can create, share, collaborate on and archive all of their project files. The process of ingesting, editing, transcoding, processing, distributing and storing data is all managed without interruption or student intervention.
DDN indicates that it provides unmatched performance to meet next-generation media production needs:
- DDN’s massively scalable storage will help Ringling College stay ahead of 4K migration challenges.
- In addition, DDN provides tight integration with Ringling’s variety of commercial workflow applications, including Pixar RenderMan, Adobe After Effects, Maxon Cinema 4D, Chaos Group V-Ray and Foundry Nook.
- To safeguard against system disruptions, the school also takes advantage of DDN’s built-in redundancy and high-availability features, including real-time data integrity and error correction.
