Avere Systems has helped ILP (Important Looking Pirates), Scandinavia's largest visual effects and digital animation studio, to meet demanding production schedules using Avere FXT Edge filers and cloud bursting technology to move rendering workloads offsite to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) without compromising the high quality that ILP is known for. With television projects including the Starz series “Black Sails” and the upcoming adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” for Syfy, ILP has grown output significantly in recent years. When project schedules collide, ILP needs the flexibility to scale up render capacity, making cloud services a necessity. However, before the implementation of the Avere solution, ILP had struggled with high latency that limited the utility of processing data in the cloud.
As Niklas Jacobson, co-founder of ILP explains, “Without Avere to improve the performance of our render workloads in the cloud, the alternative would be to either buy more hardware or to reduce our output – which is not an option.” Jacobson points to the use of Avere during its recent work on “Black Sails” that allowed it to double its render capability overnight and meet a tight deadline.
Avere has allowed ILP to become more flexible about where workloads are processed. “We don’t have to be as selective or worried when taking on jobs, we don’t have to pick and choose jobs based on when their delivery dates are, and we can take on jobs and scale on an as-needed basis.” And because Avere can work with multiple cloud providers, Jacobson adds, “Avere gives us the flexibility and freedom to build our infrastructure where and with whom it makes the most sense.”
“Avere is helping innovators like ILP unlock the potential of the cloud to deliver content for TV and films that has been held back by traditional legacy storage architectures,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO, Avere Systems. “Avere is pleased to help ILP meet its exacting quality standards and scale operations to the cloud to meet growing demand.”
