Deploy all-flash infrastructure for all data sets. VAST's new advancements in commodity flash management, data protection and reduction deliver a lower TCO than hybrid storage alternatives.
Overview
VAST Data Platform for Animation & VFX
Creativity knows no bounds, neither should your data.
For visual storytellers, building beyond the status quo means unleashing creative minds to dream without limits and share that vision with the world. With the VAST Data Platform, 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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Streamline the creative process with all-flash performance across all content to power distributed teams and deliver remarkably faster render times. The VAST Data Platform 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.
As digital animation and VFX studios push the boundaries of their art, the demands on technology are surging. Individual films now require petabytes of storage capacity and studios juggle multiple projects concurrently to meet demanding production schedules. Moreover, globally dispersed teams of artists require seamless access to data to maintain productivity. To expedite the processing of large rendering tasks, studios are turning to cloud providers for elastic compute resources.
Operating at this scale, studios are adopting AI to automate significant parts of the creative process. However, training these advanced models requires high-speed access to content, presenting a challenge for an industry where the largest datasets have historically been stored on the slowest storage systems.
With The VAST Data Platform, studios can finally afford flash for all working and render data. By consolidating all data sets to one high-performance tier visual pipelines are simplified. Managing assets becomes simple with an always-in-sync metadata index provided by the VAST Catalog that lets teams search, find, and curate data sets via UI or SQL interface for automation and advanced queries.
Pixar Collaborates with VAST Data as the Data Platform for Its New “Elemental” Film and Beyond
Learn how Pixar leverages the VAST Data Platform to create captivating visual stories for global audiences, revolutionizing data-intensive animated feature productions.
‘Elemental’ is the most technically complex film that Pixar has ever made, but with VAST we were able to build beyond our current level of animation and consider new techniques that no one had ever considered before because we didn’t have the technology in place to support it. VAST’s technology has allowed us to change the way we store and access data while also opening the door to new potential visual pipelines.
Eric Bermender
Head of Data Center & IT Infrastructure , Pixar Animation Studios
Key Benefits
Accelerate creativity to AI speeds with the VAST Data Platform
VAST Data breaks the decades-old tradeoff between performance and capacity with a new architecture that enables unlimited processing on affordable flash, at up to exabyte scale. Studios can take advantage of the VAST Data Platform’s ability to manage data over multiple sites and the cloud to support the work of creative teams around the world. The VAST DataSpace creates a global namespace for data access by distributed teams as well as cloud burst workflows. All-flash performance with intelligent data management means digital artists have greater access to assets, rendering pipelines run faster, AI learns more effectively, and the entire studio works more efficiently.
Coming in 2024: The VAST DataEngine provides an intelligent execution layer to automate AI-powered visual pipelines across edge, core, and cloud.
All Flash, at Archive Economics
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.
Ultra-Resilient, Ultra Reliable
VAST eliminates the problems of common node failures, delivers fail-in-place resilience, and is designed for 99.999+% uptime from petabyte to exabyte scale.
Global Namespace
Seamless access across edge, core, and cloud for distributed teams. Simplify cloud rendering workloads with data efficient cloud bursting.
Reference Architecture
Sample rendering pipeline utilizing VAST Data Platform
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
Resources
Innovation begins with understanding
Solution Brief
VAST Data Platform for Animation & VFX
Maximize render performance across any data set, support multiple users and protocols, while providing dedicated quality of service for specific applications.
2 pages
Webinar
Supercharge Animation & VFX in Hollywood
Watch this webinar to learn what it takes to create visual effects for binge-worthy content, and how infrastructure can shape the outcome. Get insights into how Ingenuity Studios leverages a radically affordable all-flash platform to create award-worthy visuals for films, television and music videos, while empowering their animators and artists to meet aggressive timelines for their most discerning clients.
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