Aardman

GB Labs installed a 3.2TB HyperSpace accelerator over 192TB of Space+ HDD

GB Labs systems are specifically deisgned for the broadcast, film and video industry so when a job is submitted to the HyperSpace unit, it understands that the job must be pulled immediatley from the top level of the SSD storage straight into the render blades. This works great for very fast render times.

GB Labs CORE OS provides network traffic graphs that clearly show spikes during that time and demonstrate that these systems are under heavy load. Aardman found that the render farm is often busy just before lunch time.

Regardless of the load, the GB Labs systems continue to power the edit systems with real-time playback for any client review or agencies and clients that come in to watch.

Another key factor in selecting GB Labs was the excellent administration tools available.

Aardman is able to monitor who is putting the most amount of load on the system at any point of time.

In order to assure that creativity is never placed on hold, Aardman uses a 40GbE link from the GB Labs SPACE+ and HyperSpace systems into their media network along with a 10GbE link from the GB Labs ECHO Bridge into the same media network.

This allows Aardman to have up to 35 CG arists working simultaneously.

When rendering kicks off, that add another 60 render machines to the load.

There are six edit machines as well in a grade suite. This brings the total to about 100 machines accessing the system at one time wihtout skipping a beat.