Success is not a freebie for tech startups: entrepreneurs have to work hard every day to earn it. What helps is to have a great team, fantastic partners and awesome customers. Innovating customers are the most valuable assets for any startup and we at Excelero are grateful to have so many. In this blog series we will be showcasing our earliest adopting customers to give you an idea of the benefits they have experienced using NVMe storage with NVMesh.
Five Questions with Technicolor’s IT Lead Amir Bemanian
Enterprise NVMe flash is in production at major enterprises around the world and delivering impressive performance gains and efficiency advantages. In this first of our customer success blog series, Excelero spotlights its customer Technicolor, whose director of engineering technology Amir Bemanian sat down with us recently to share the benefits the company obtains with Excelero’s NVMesh.®
1. Can you please describe your organization and workflows?
TECHNICOLOR: Technicolor is a worldwide technology leader in the media and entertainment sector. We are involved in the entire production process of many Hollywood blockbusters from visual effects and animation to post-production. We deliver advanced video services to content creators and distributors, so together we can enable exciting new experiences for consumers in theaters, homes and on-the-go.
Our work requires a storage system that supports extremely high levels of concurrent throughput in accessing the same dataset – a dataset which recently was migrated from spinning disk to Excelero’s NVMesh® solution.
2. Why is NVMe well-suited for your application?
TECHNICOLOR: We’re constantly being asked to deliver a final version of a movie in shorter period of time frame. At the same time we’re also being asked to deliver many different versions of the same content – for example, as 4K, HDR, SDR, or Dolby Vision files – which puts a tremendous pressure on our IT infrastructure. Having storage ecosystem which everyone can concurrently work on is the only way to meet deadlines efficiently.
3. How does NVMesh benefit your production NVMe deployment?
TECHNICOLOR:
NVMesh allows us to move from design to production in a matter of days, not weeks or months.- The concurrent access to the same dataset that we get from NVMesh gives production lots of flexibility. For example we can allow creative professionals to have instant feedback from editorial department and quality control teams, compared to the sequential workflow of spinning disk, which means only limited access to your data set.
- NVMesh can be consumed as either block or file, which is immensely helpful. This means the file system software layer of the applications we run on top of the storage, which has tremendous value, can be preserved. Excelero’s software manages high performance throughput delivered to servers and clients running StorNext or GPFS, or purely as XFS, exported over a 100Gbps network that delivers file access.
4. How has your application grown?
TECHNICOLOR: Our NVMe capacity using Excelero was doubled in 2019.
5. What can your business do today that it couldn’t do before?
TECHNICOLOR: I’ve been very lucky to have a very smart and dedicated engineering team that supports production 24/7. Every time we get a call from them, it’s an escalation which needs to be dealt with immediately, especially off-hours or over the weekend. I received an email during a heavy-delivery weekend with subject line “ NVMe performance.” For a few seconds I had rush of anxiety not knowing what I have to deal with. After finishing the body of email, the request was: “Can you let us know how much bandwidth we’re consuming, because we’re hitting the storage with every single client, and not seeing any negative impact. “ – This was nine Baselight SSD systems working at the same time on a single Excelero NVMe volume. This kind of performance would not have been possible without the Excelero NVMesh solution.
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Talking About Successful Experience:
Technicolor and Excelero: Talking About Successful Experience
