Seagate Helps Boutique Animation Shop Dream Big

In the video production industry, great work can lead to more work — which means more generated data, and subsequently, the need for more storage. Od Studios — a boutique visual effects studio with an emphasis on creating animation for films, TV series, and commercials — had ambitious goals to produce full-length animated feature films using the latest technology and production practices. To reach their goal, they knew that they could no longer get by with their older consumer-grade storage solution.

Od Studios needed a storage solution that would allow it to scale and provide it with the flexibility to resolve its specific problems. As a relatively new company, it had been using a limited consumer-grade storage system with mediocre throughput that made it difficult to produce work quickly, and constantly question how many days remained until it pushed the system to failure.

As a newer studio with a limited budget, affordable TCO was very high on its priority list. However, the studio knew that it needed to balance affordability with throughput and stability. It also wanted the flexibility to allow for scaling and future growth without reengineering its storage solution beyond a certain size. Plus, it wanted to install whichever vendor’s drives it chose, as well as to use the Lustre file system software it selected.

While researching hardware vendors for a replacement solution, the studio found Seagate — and chose the Exos X 5U84 RAID array because it offered a cost-efficient design, more raw storage capacity than the studio had initially considered, and it provided the studio with the flexibility to pivot should it ever need to.