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and a lot of crossed fingers. But being able to spin up more resources in the cloud as you need them makes hitting those deadlines more readily and with less stress. Prior to Qumulo, Cinesite had a fixed set of on-premises cores, and a group of effects artists sometimes exceeding what the on-premises resources could manage. The company looked at how it could use the cloud as a new way to alleviate the delays of getting effects rendered and out the door, and to enable the creatives to keep working without having to wait for technology to become available. Cinesite employs the Qumulo solution across multiple AWS availability zones, which helps ensure consistent performance for its artists, regardless of their geography. In order to integrate seamlessly between Cinesite’s Qumulo-on-AWS deployment and the company’s on-premises Qumulo infrastructure, Qumulo software replicates the data between on-premises and AWS. Cinesite can use Qumulo to sync huge digital assets between AWS and the company’s on-premises environment. Cloud render nodes can produce frames and store them in the Qumulo system instantly. Qumulo then replicates the frames back to the cloud at speeds of over
SHOW MUST GO ON Cinesite worked on Rocketman (above), using the cloud to reduce bottlenecks and meet deadlines
20GB/s, according to Russell. Qumulo is also improving the ability of artists and technicians to work remotely, as the home office and off-site studio become a more familiar part of most companies’ workflows. Working with AWS and remote access technology supplier, Teradici, Qumulo has developed what it calls Cloud Studio. “Converting from a file to an object workflow is tough for a lot of applications,” says Russell. “Qumulo provides an API that is the same API on-premises that you would use in the cloud with a virtual Qumulo data service. That allows those workflows to be scalable to the cloud, so you can practically use them anywhere. “The change you’re seeing in new architectures around cloud is breaking through the idea of locality. We’ve always had an idea that we have to be close to our data or graphics processor or applications.
What we’re seeing is a trend toward cloudifying all of those things so that you can use any set of resources” Taking advantage of the cloud in this way enables all kinds of new solutions. In the case of Cinesite’s Montreal facility, while there is an AWS zone based in Canada, it was discovered to be more cost-effective to use other zones that were farther away. Using Qumulo’s data service, Cinesite was able to copy the data to whichever region was most cost effective at the moment to run renders without sacrificing latency. “We’ve seen a lot of our customers who were never thinking of cloud are all of a sudden leading with it and asking how they can enable users to work from anywhere,” adds Russell.
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