Media and Entertainment Industry Turning to Qumulo

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Apr 24, 2017) - Qumulo , the leader in modern scale-out storage, today announced that leading media and entertainment companies are choosing Qumulo to accelerate their data-intensive workloads, including VR, VFX, 4K, animation rendering and broadcast. Qumulo also announced that DreamWorks Animation ( see separate press release ), alter ego, Awesometown, Deluxe VR, Intelligent Creatures, Mr.X, Pipeline Studios, and RodeoFX have joined the rapidly growing number of customers turning to Qumulo Core for their digital content factories.

"File-based data, including 4K video, broadcasting, animation rendering or VFX is the core asset of the media and entertainment business," said Peter Godman, founder and CTO of Qumulo. "If data storage fails or slows, the digital factory grinds to a halt. Customers need immensely scalable file storage that can easily store tens of billions of files and deliver maximum performance with real-time visibility and control. This is why the media and entertainment industry is turning to Qumulo."

Animation Rendering Large-scale animation rendering requires the use of compute cores or what is commonly known as animation render farms. These machines complete thousands of compute jobs that generate millions to billions of files that require high performance storage systems at petabyte scale. Qumulo's modern scale-out storage is ideal for these workloads. One of the world's largest film animation studios selected Qumulo to support their 40k core render farm running 24x7 to create water buoyancy simulations for a hit hollywood motion picture. The scenes had billions of data points and multi GB/sec throughput requirements.

Live Action Virtual Reality Applications Immersive live action virtual reality applications generate tremendous amounts of digital files requiring storage that is highly scalable and performant to ingest data quickly. Storage performance often dictates if a single cluster can serve as a central repository for staging data or serving content directly to render farms. A dedicated virtual reality services unit offering end-to-end production for immersive content selected Qumulo for its data-intensive VR workflows. Rigs that operate 16 simultaneous digital cameras to capture a 360-degree environment generates enormous amounts of file-based data that need highly performant modern scale-out storage.

2D Compositing and Visual Effects The opening sequence of La La Land consisted of nearly six minutes of uninterrupted footage consisting of over 8,000 frames. The visual effects required rendering of CG cars, additional dancers and multiple takes to appear as one long, continuous shot. This process required a massive render farm that generated hundreds of terabytes of files requiring highly scalable and performant storage. Visual effects studio Crafty Apes selected Qumulo's modern scale-out storage, deploying a six-node, Windows-based production system to handle the data-intensive 2D compositing and visual effects for the Academy Award winning film, La La Land .

Tim LeDoux, founder and VFX supervisor for Crafty Apes said, "With critical high-profile projects, you want to know exactly what you're going to be leaning on for successful delivery. When the La La Land project came around, it was make or break, and we were never down for a moment. Qumulo is our rock, allowing us to focus on the visual effects with absolute confidence the data is safe."

Qumulo Core was designed from the ground up for the new era of multi-petabyte data scale on premises and in the cloud. Qumulo Core stores tens of billions of files with scalable throughput and is the only product that provides real-time visibility and control for file systems at petabyte scale, making it the solution of choice for the media and entertainment industry. Storage administrators can instantly see usage, activity and throughput at any level of the unified directory structure, no matter how many files exist in the file system.

Qumulo's media and entertainment customers include: alter ego , Ant Farm , Atomic Fiction , Awesometown , Blind Studios , Crafty Apes , The DAVE School , Deluxe VR , DreamWorks Animation , Eight Solutions , FotoKem , Intelligent Creatures , Mr. X , MSG Networks , Pipeline Studios , RodeoFX , Sportvision , ZOIC Studios and more.

Connect with Qumulo at NAB Qumulo Core will be featured in booth #SL6605 at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show , taking place April 22-27 in Las Vegas. The company will sponsor, exhibit, and demonstrate the power of Qumulo for media and entertainment workflows including:

• End-to-end post-production video editing and asset management
• 4K and 5K R3D editing
• Real-time encoding and broadcast in the cloud
• Local and cloud collaborative NLE editing
• 4K Lossless compression and playback

To schedule one-on-one meetings with Qumulo representatives at NAB, send email to info@qumulo.com or schedule online here .

Helpful Links

• Qumulo
• Qumulo Core
• Qumulo Blog
• Qumulo on Twitter
• Crafty Apes Case Study
• Media and Entertainment Solution Overview

Suggested Tweet: Media and entertainment industry turning to @Qumulo for modern scale-out #storage http://qumulo.com/4017

About Qumulo Qumulo, headquartered in Seattle, the leader in modern scale-out storage, enables enterprises to manage and store enormous numbers of digital assets through real-time analytics built directly into the file system. Qumulo Core is a software-only solution designed to leverage the price/performance of commodity hardware coupled with the modern technologies of flash, virtualization and cloud. Qumulo was founded in 2012 by the inventors of scale-out NAS, and has attracted a team of storage innovators from Isilon, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft. Qumulo has raised $130 million in four rounds of funding from leading investors. For more information, visit www.qumulo.com