LOS ANGELES -- RIOT, an award winning bi-coastal digital studio that provides creative visual effects, animation, telecine and post-production services, has selected SGIs RM660 as the primary storage to support their digital intermediate workflow. The SGI RM660, based on DataDirect Networks field proven S2A (Silicon Storage Appliance) 8500 storage solution, enables real-time processing in 2K and HD application environments.
DataDirect Networks (DDN) S2A technology is the ideal storage solution for high throughput, high capacity and multiple operating system environments found in todays digital intermediate and post production environments.
We chose the SGI® RM660 after considerable due diligence to find a storage solution that would meet our scalable, extremely fast throughput and high availability requirements, said Robb Cadzow, Chief Engineer at RIOT. Its architecture, based on DDNs S2A technology, has broad industry support and enables a wide range of shared and parallel file systems that allow us to utilize the many types of workstations and applications to create in real-time regardless of file format.
We found the RM660s unique architecture could also support not just high concurrency but read and write performance equally. This unique capability delivered on all counts, with support of up to two 2K streams of real-time reads and one stream of real-time write along with several streams of real-time HD, added Cadzow.
RIOT has initially installed 18.6 TB of raw capacity used as shared storage between the studios Thomson Spirit 2k telecine, Da Vinci color correction system, AutoDesk Fire editing system, Flame compositing and Inferno visual effects suites. This allows RIOT to easily scale their bandwidth and capacity needs as they grow, while empowering real-time collaborative workflow throughout their digital post-production process.
