Snowball VFX

Challenge

Snowball VFX is a production and outsourcing services animation studio, specializing in highly complex 3-D animation projects and related services. Based on the philosophy that a studio designed by artists for artists fosters the best creative environment, Snowball provides its customers with high-quality animated content for home entertainment, computer games, TV series, feature films, and media campaigns, as well as software and project management solutions for animation companies worldwide.

Although Snowball is a relatively small company with 70 employees, it is a huge consumer of storage bandwidth and disk capacity. Its visual effects and animation artists each require large amounts of storage space and need high-speed access to data. During production, each artist is storing raw video files that are 300 MB to over 1 GB each. All files must be kept online and available on primary storage because many people are working simultaneously on the same file.

At the start of its business, Snowball was utilizing a 2 TB solution for all of its data storage. In five years, the company’s IT environment has grown to include 70 dual quad-core servers that sit in front of 100 TB of raw disk storage capacity from its IBM System Storage® N series. In addition to the servers, Snowball has 50 high-performance workstations for the artists who are creating the animation and visual effects. It required a solution that would minimize storage costs while still maintaining the performance level it required for accessing and backing up its large animation files.

Solution

Snowball deployed an IBM Real-time Compression Appliance in front of its IBM System Storage N series and transparently increased its available storage capacity by 3.5x. Snowball’s artists are creating 3-D animation files; essentially these files are each small databases that are not very effective when stored on disk. However, once they are put through the automated real-time compression engine, they can be compressed by 70 percent. Currently, Snowball has 100 TB of data online, and after compression, it is able to access more than 200 TB of available storage space. Eighty percent of the available storage space is currently being used for file storage, with the remaining 20 percent used for migrating data back and forth.

Beyond compressing files to save storage space, IBM Real-time Compression also streamlined the artists’ workflow through the automation of the data compression and saved the company valuable time, which equates to cost savings to the bottom line. Artists are not expending time decompressing and compressing zip files. The real-time compression happens transparently so artists are able to work on files just as if they were full files without compression. Snowball also realized significant improvements in file access performance of 93 percent and was able to reduce file backup/restore times, further increasing productivity.

Snowball is constantly trying to find cost-effective ways to provide a better product at the best price in the industry. The IBM Real-time Compression solution enabled the company to reduce its cost per terabyte of storage by over 70 percent—from $5,000 to less than $1,500 per terabyte. The savings are not limited only to compressing data and storing it; Snowball has also found ways to integrate some of its own technology into the pipeline, providing an additional layer of data management and human management that further lowers production costs.

The IBM Real-time Compression solution provides Snowball with far more capacity at a significantly lower cost per terabyte while also delivering optimized performance and storage operations. This allows Snowball to meet its growing workload and increased capacity needs without any interruption to daily routine.

Key benefits

By automating the data compression process without any performance degradation, IBM Real-time Compression enabled Snowball to lower costs, improve performance, and provide higher-quality animation at competitive prices.

Storage efficiency

By utilizing the IBM Real-time Compression Appliance, Snowball’s animators and effects artists can compress files up to 70 percent, creating a 3.5x increase in effective storage capacity.

Performance increase

The automated compression of large animation files enabled Snowball to improve file access performance time by 93 percent and reduce backup/recovery times—significantly increasing artist productivity.

Cost savings

IBM Real-time Compression enabled Snowball to reduce the overall cost per terabyte throughout the data life cycle by over 70 percent (from $5,000 to less than $1,500). This allows the company to produce higher-quality animation and effects without increasing budget costs—giving Snowball a significant competitive edge.

Summary

IBM Real-time Compression is an innovative storage efficiency technology that can help clients manage network attached storage (NAS) data growth and reduce complexity in the IT department. IBM Real-time Compression Appliances are the only storage compression solutions that can shrink primary, online NAS data in real time, without performance degradation. On busy systems, IBM Real-time Compression can improve user response time and application throughput by improving the efficiency of the disk system cache, as well as the disks.

The business benefits of IBM Real-time Compression extend beyond primary data. Efficiency can be improved throughout the information life cycle. Copies, snapshots, archives, and backups can deliver significant additional cost savings when primary data has been compressed. IT realizes greater storage efficiency, productivity, performance, and cost reduction with real-time compression.