Aardman invest in even more cracking storage from GB Labs.
Aardman, the award-winning UK studio and owners of a worldwide reputation for animation have once again invested in GB Labs' storage, adding two SPACE EX solutions to their existing SPACE+ unit.
Innovators of intelligent storage and providers of a comprehensive range of online, nearline, backup and archive solutions for Media and Entertainment workflows, GB Labs, have developed a strong, working relationship with Aardman ever since their first purchase of a GB Labs' storage solution back in 2015; so were delighted when they asked for help with expanding their existing solutions for a brand new, year-long project, due to involve a high level of data.
Aardman decided on GB Labs again based on their need for storage that would add to their current pipeline, with minimal infrastructure and configuration changes; it also helped that one of their considerations for purchasing their first SPACE+ unit, was that it could be easily expanded without needing to worry about separate server heads and multiple namespaces.
The overall benefit of the two new SPACE EX units will be an increase in capacity from 150TB to 250TB. The SPACE EX units were advised as it kept the performance high across the RAID arrays; therefore, storage capacity could be increased without a decrease in speed. All proving vital whilst 160 clients work on current Aardman projects, including; DFS, Change 4 Life and their recent Fortnum and Mason's Christmas commercial.
"Our storage system from GB Labs has been a high-performing and reliable part of our production pipeline, concurrently used between our Edit, CGI and Grade teams. The network connectivity options and addition of the HyperSpace acceleration layer gives us an accurate playback performance, whilst enabling up to around 160 clients to be connected."