NEXSAN STORAGE PROVIDES DIGITAL MOVIE MAGIC

The InfiniSAN™ ATAboy2™ from Nexsan Technologies, the leader in innovative storage solutions, provides the backbone for storing vast amounts of data generated by the Moving Picture Company (MPC) for the digital effects used in a variety of film projects.

MPC is one of the world’s leading post-production facilities, creating high-end digital visual effects and computer animation for the advertising, music, television and feature film industries. The Soho, London-based company is responsible for the digital wizardry seen in Hollywood productions such as Alien Vs. Predator, Big Fish, Ella Enchanted, all three of the Harry Potter films including the latest release, Troy and Wimbledon. The increased use of computer-generated imagery and the capacity needed for each of these shots have placed huge demands on its data storage.

Nexsan’s ATAboy2 is a key component of MPC’s 100TB-capacity storage facility and thousand-processor render farm. With more than 20 artists working on different aspects of a single shot or sequence at any given time, MPC needed an extremely flexible network with a balanced architecture to supply enough storage capacity to enable these parallel, data-intensive operations. The ATAboy2 allows MPC to meet the demand for these data-intensive projects with enhanced performance and minimum downtime.

"Storage is pretty much a commodity to us," said Steve MacPherson, Head of Technical Operations in MPC’s film division. "But Nexsan has proved to be so reliable over the past four years, and at such an attractive combination of price and performance, that it’s become the bedrock of our storage system."

"CGI is becoming a standard process in today’s filmmaking environment – from the creation of fantasy worlds and creatures to cost-saving effects and untethered camera shots," said Brendan Kinkade, Nexsan Vice President of Marketing. "For those working in this digital realm, it is imperative that they adopt a storage solution that maximizes capacity, minimizes complexity and can scale with the demands of the business. Nexsan’s ATAboy series is a boon to those artists who push pixels for a living."