VFX and post-production house Cutting Edge has overhauled its file serving system to handle a greater volume of film and TV projects.
Cutting has deployed multiple Oracle ZFS Storage systems and Oracle’s StorageTek SL150 modular tape libraries from Magna Systems and Engineering to support visual effects (VFX), editorial and rendering projects on a variety of long-form TV and feature length movie projects in its Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne studios.
Owner and director of the Cutting Edge Group, Michael Burton, said the company had a need to upgrade its current file serving system to handle a greater volume of projects and data that would also optimise workflows.
"We began a search for the best options," he said. "When we assessed what was available it became clear that the Oracle ZFS Storage offered by Oracle partner Magna Systems and Engineering was by far the best solution for our needs.”
Cutting Edge Head of IT R and D explained, Dan Mons, said after initial discussions with the team at Magna Systems and Engineering we tested and evaluated the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance at our studios.
"We were particularly impressed with the ZFS Storage Appliance’s performance and the fact that they have excellent analytics about the file systems embedded into their core," he said.
"This means if there are any issues, they can be quickly and easily identified with no slow down or loss of performance.”
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance combines an intelligent DRAM-centric architecture and multi-threaded symmetric multiprocessing storage operating system for faster streaming of media files.
It enables studios to produce movies in multiple formats (2K, 4K, 8K) and bring them to market faster.
It also provides highly scalable performance for VFX generation, easily handling millions of DPX files and seamlessly delivering content to interactive digital artists during peak editing periods.
To complement the Oracle ZS Series systems Cutting Edge also purchased Oracle’s StorageTek SL150 modular tape libraries, two for system backups and one for both archive and backup.
With scalability from 30 to 300 cartridge slots, the SL150 enables capacity to reach 750 TB. Easy to install expansion modules offer seamless growth to accommodate fast growing production and post-production environments.