Universal Storage for Animation & VFX

Once Upon a Time…

For visual story tellers, building beyond the status quo means unleashing creative minds to dream in 4D and then seamlessly turn that into art. With Universal Storage the creative process is no longer bound by the restrictions of limited data access, long render times and costly downtime.

Trusted by the world’s leading animation & VFX studios
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  • Company3
  • FOX
  • TAT Productions
  • lola VFX
  • Ingenuity
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Embrace machine intelligence with access across all your archived content and deliver remarkably faster render times. Guarantee QoS and limitless scale. Universal Storage is the new standard in storytelling, built for the AI-era and real time workflows.

Overview

The weight of legacy infrastructure is throttling the creative process.

For digital animation and VFX studios, I/O performance can directly impact the speed of production by dictating both server farm and creative team efficiency. In addition, modern rendering workloads need to embrace AI, machine learning and deep learning frameworks in order to automate larger portions of the creative process. To train these new models, studios are finding the need to provide high-speed access to content archives for high-throughput computation, which is a challenge for an industry where the largest data sets are typically kept on the slowest storage.

With VAST Data, animation studios and VFX shops can finally afford flash for all their working and render data. With affordable flash feeding the pipeline, each digital artist and all the AI-based applications can access the entirety of a studio’s stored data at speeds up to 10 times faster than HDD-based scale-out storage.

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We generate massive data sets for every project we work on. For our 3D and simulation teams, a single frame can require several gigabytes — and we need thousands of frames just for one sequence. Having the infrastructure to control that sprawl and serve more than 300 remote workers who all need low-latency access to that data is critical to our operations. With VAST, smart storage architecture allows us to unleash the power of all-flash without breaking our project budget.

Grant Miller
Partner & VFX Supervisor, Ingenuity Studios
Key Benefits

Accelerate creativity to AI speeds with Universal Storage.

VAST Data breaks the decades-old tradeoff between storage performance and capacity with a new storage architecture that enables unlimited processing on affordable flash, at up to exabyte scale. VAST’s DASE architecture allows studios to scale performance and capacity independently. By disaggregating the capacity provided by QLC flash from the performance provided by the stateless VAST Servers, digital artists have greater access to assets, rendering pipelines run faster, AI learns more effectively, and the entire studio works more efficiently.

All Flash, at Archive Economics

Deploy all-flash infrastructure for all your active data sets. VAST's new advancements in commodity flash management, data protection and reduction deliver a lower TCO than hybrid storage alternatives.

Up to 10x greater performance across your entire archive

Get access to all data at NVMe speeds with VAST. By democratizing flash for all data, you no longer have to make a cost/performance tradeoff for some data.

Unrivaled NAS Simplicity

Eliminate the need for tiering appliances, client agents, data migrations, and other complications with a single, simple-to-manage, scale-out namespace.

Dedicated Quality of Service

Dedicate front-end servers and the performance they provide to the most critical projects. VAST's server pooling capability provides dedicated QoS for competing projects.

Accelerated storage for AI, Machine & and Deep Learning

Saturate any GPU server with VAST’s simple, accelerated NAS offering and increase the power of your AI-based tools.

Revolutionary Data Reduction for Rendering Data

Achieve 2.5:1 data reduction in render pipelines on average with VAST's revolutionary Similarity-Based Data Reduction, delivering unprecedented storage efficiency.

All Flash, at Archive Economics

Deploy all-flash infrastructure for all your active data sets. VAST's new advancements in commodity flash management, data protection and reduction deliver a lower TCO than hybrid storage alternatives.

Up to 10x greater performance across your entire archive

Get access to all data at NVMe speeds with VAST. By democratizing flash for all data, you no longer have to make a cost/performance tradeoff for some data.

Unrivaled NAS Simplicity

Eliminate the need for tiering appliances, client agents, data migrations, and other complications with a single, simple-to-manage, scale-out namespace.

Dedicated Quality of Service

Dedicate front-end servers and the performance they provide to the most critical projects. VAST's server pooling capability provides dedicated QoS for competing projects.

Accelerated storage for AI, Machine & and Deep Learning

Saturate any GPU server with VAST’s simple, accelerated NAS offering and increase the power of your AI-based tools.

Revolutionary Data Reduction for Rendering Data

Achieve 2.5:1 data reduction in render pipelines on average with VAST's revolutionary Similarity-Based Data Reduction, delivering unprecedented storage efficiency.

Reference Architecture

Sample rendering pipeline utilizing VAST Universal Storage

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