SAN Creates Previews of Coming Attractions

By Kelly Jackson Higgins

At Pacific Title & Art Studio in Hollywood , the SAN is the network.

The digital explosion in the media and entertainment industry forced Pacific Title to ditch its Network File System-based system for a Fibre Channel SAN environment that supports both its collaborative workflow and its near- and long-term storage. "The whole company runs on the SAN," says Andy Tran, CIO of Pacific Title, which creates trailers, credits and subtitles for most U.S. films. The company began building the SAN over a year ago.

Pacific Title isn't exactly your typical enterprise. The company has been a Hollywood institution since 1919 and produced credits for big-screen classics such as "Gone With the Wind" and "Ben Hur," and its business centers around high-speed film scanning and recording. A movie can have as much as 8 to 10 terabytes of data, including multiple versions of color correction.

That's not just a lot of data, but a lot to manage. "It's difficult to manage different copies and versions and to track where the data is," says Tran, whose company most recently worked on trailers and special effects for Seabiscuit and The Matrix: Reloaded.

The company previously used NFS file servers and moved data in an assembly-line fashion from desktop to desktop for each step of the production process. The color artist would then, for instance, just sit and wait until the film file arrived at his desktop via an FTP file transfer. "And if the system died, it was a day or so before we recovered," Tran says.

All that has changed with Pacific Title's $1.5 million SAN environment, which Tran credits with doubling and tripling the media company's workflow efficiency. And the company has jumped from one to 100 Tbytes of spinning disks within nine months, another example of just how much its data and business are growing, he says.

"Our storage is growing because our studio clients are asking us to keep the film files around for a few more months " they tend to keep a lot of stuff online until the movie release," Tran says. "And we create multiple versions of trailers in different languages and end credits in different languages."

One of the newest additions to the SAN " which is actually two SANs in two sites about a mile apart, connected by a fiber pipe " is 38.8 terabytes of Serial ATA storage for its SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS storage file server. The CXFS is the heart of Pacific Title's digital scanning and recording operations. "The main benefit is the I/O performance," Tran says. The SAN runs on Brocade SilkWorm SAN switches.

The CXFS SAN environment let Pacific Title stop moving its massive files around and start sharing them, which can cut workflow time in half, says Jim Farney, senior marketing manager for media industries at SGI. The CXFS system basically fools SAN-attached devices into thinking they are talking to a native file system, he says.

"The key thing is that everyone in the facility can see all the files all the time," Farney says. "They can read them and write to them and CXFS is the traffic-cop metadata server keeps the file system in order."

Here's how Pacific Title creates and stores a trailer on its SAN backbone. Pacific Title first scans in a the movie from a film scanner, to digitize it into a file. It goes on the TP9500 Fibre Channel disk at a rate of 100- to 200 megabytes per second per hour. Then the file is injected into the SGI Onyx visual workstation and Pacific Title does the editing or digitization or colorization. Then they export it back to the SAN and it's available for additional editing, Tran says.

After two or three weeks, the data gets spun to the nearline ATA drive and then a month or so later, archived onto tape. Pacific Title gives its clients from nearby Dreamworks, Sony and Universal Studios the final film output or if they request it, the digital files.

One initial challenge was the SAN environment's mix of operating systems " SGI, Linux and MacOS. Pacific Title had to port its internally developed apps for creating movie trailers to the different platforms, but they work together fairly smoothly. "When a user sits down, it's the same app whether it's an SGI, Linux or Mac machine," Tran says.

And the catch with the Fibre Channel SAN, Tran says, is that to add a node, you have to bring the entire cluster down. "Ultimately, I'd like to see a SAN speak IP so you can plug something in and you're ready to go," he says.

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