Bringing the Comic Book Classic to Life By Dyan James When Intelligent Creatures moved to a larger Toronto Ontario-based facility in October 2007 the growing visual effects house now had the physical capacity to accommodate their increasing need for more data storage. The move coupled with the undertaking of The Watchmen—their largest project to date—prompted the company to turn to Isilon IQ clustered storage to power its post-production workflow including 2D compositing and 3D animation on the film which is currently in production. Executives at the creative house say the addition of the Isilon system has improved production with the increase of data access network performance and faster project turnaround. “The good thing about Isilon is every time we add more storage it just gets faster ” says Michael Hatton chief technology officer and visual effects supervisor at Intelligent Creatures. “It actually improves with more storage. That’s a huge thing for us because obviously with more storage we usually have more work and more people working so the need to have the speed increase was huge.” Isilon IQ clustered storage enables customers in high-performance computing environments to achieve high levels of throughput and massive scalability all within a manageable global namespace. Each Isilon IQ storage node delivers more CPU memory bandwidth and capacity thus enabling linear scaling of capacity and performance in the cluster while helping customers store protect and manage their data faster. It was when work began on The Watchmen—a project sizably larger than Intelligent Creature’s previous films which include Mr. & Mrs. Smith Babel and The Game Plan—that the company realized its growing need for more data storage. “It’s quite a large project for us ” says Hatton. “We’re not a giant company like Sony and we’ve had an enormous data need. Our processing pipeline and production has increased our need for data management and rendering and just general data management and that’s helped us a lot.” In business since 2003 Intelligent Creatures holds fully integrated 2D and 3D composting and animation pipelines and is considered among the industry’s more progressive VFX creators. It has counted Warner Brothers Miramax Films MGM New Line Cinemas and 20th Century Fox as clients. Prior to the switch to Isilon’s clustered storage Intelligent Creatures used Apple Xraids which according to Hatton worked well for a company their size at the time but their increasingly larger projects began pushing the storage too hard. “[Apple Xraids] were good for a very small company which we were when we started ” says Hatton. “We’ve grown quite substantially we’ve increased our efficiencies a lot and that storage just couldn’t keep up.” Hatton also values the Isilon system’s redundancy—if something fails no data will be lost. “We have the confidence knowing that if anything fails [the data] is still going to be there.” “It’s very easy to swap something out ” Hatton says. “It’s also very easy to grow the data. It’s a matter of bringing in a new node plugging it in and we’ve got more data online. That’s been very beneficial to us because our needs kind of scale and grow at quite a drastic rate sometimes.” Does Isilon have a breaking point? It will take some time to discover it. “It has the flexibility of adding storage and adding it is very quick and very easy and it actually improves speed-wise as we add it ” says Hatton. “Some systems when you do add storage will take a hit on the speed as it gets itself sorted out but this one keeps going. It will be a while before we reach its limit.”
