Jock Animation Uses Sledgehammer on Animated Feature

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Tue, 07/22/2008 - 20:00 -- Nick Dager

Johannesburg South Africa-based Jock Animation selected a Sledgehammer network attached storage system to support their work on a full-length animated feature film currently in production. While Jock Animation first began work on the animated feature using a makeshift NAS it quickly became apparent that the storage device was not up to the challenge of this demanding project because rendering jobs took an inordinate amount of time and brought network traffic between the NAS and render farm to a crawl. Jock animators were prone to extended periods of “hibernation” during rendering sessions as access to the shared storage almost came to a halt. Since installing Maximum Throughput’s Sledgehammer NAS Jock’s animators say they are thrilled with the increase in performance and productivity. “The pipeline is now working effectively ” says Martin Heigan technical supervisor for Jock Animation. “The Sledgehammer has eliminated long periods of waiting. We’re impressed with how this NAS intelligently manages the available bandwidth on our network.” The Sledgehammer NAS was specifically designed to support access to heavy data loads by multiple clients on a network and to handle network-heavy operations without performance degradation. “The performance is great. With Sledgehammer our workflow has improved by about 70 percent ” says Braam Smit Jock’s IT manager. “We used to wait three to five minutes for a heavy scene to open. Now it opens in under a minute.” After comparing Sledgehammer to other NAS systems on the market Jock Animation determined that the price was particularly attractive in light of the system’s six TBs of storage features and performance and believed strongly that their increased productivity would lead to a more rapid return on investment. Jock’s Heigan says “Sledgehammer gives us exactly what we need: fast transfer speeds a large storage capacity and a powerful solution that’s easy to manage.” The Sledgehammer sale and installation has been worked out in conjunction with Touchvision Maximum Throughput’s premier reseller and partner in South Africa. Jock Animation www.jock-animation.com Maximum Throughput www.max-t.com Touchvision www.touchvision.co.za