EGG Uses EMC Isilon Solution To Facilitate High Profile Productions

Tyrell CCT, leading provider of digital media solutions,has announced that EGG Post Production has purcashed a wealth of their equipment to help in high profile productions including Sinbad, a joint venture between Sky1, BBC and Impossible Pictures.
The production company have invested in the EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to accelerate the production and collaboration processes of the several high profile productions.
In addition EGG has deployed EMC Isilon X200 Nodes combined with the EMC Isilon SmartPools, SmartQuotas and Aspera software applications.
The solution has allowed EGG to dramatically improve the processes it uses to manage rushes, create and edit visual effects while streamlining its collaboration with other production houses also working on elements of the production.
"Ahead of starting this new project, we knew we would need more capacity as well as the ability to share data between several other parties involved in the production," explains Gareth Young, Co-founder of EGG Post Production.
"What we needed was a production wide storage architecture that could offer us the performance, capacity and ability to scale in line with our needs while offering us guaranteed compatibility with all our systems as well as our remote partners."
Dublin-based EGG already uses a number of SANs and Direct Attached Storage pools but had experienced issues with not having the right source material available to the right work area across its 10 offline rooms, 2 online rooms, and 7 graphics workstations. One of its key requirements was the ability to segment portions of storage and allocate quotas to external partners who connect via dedicated WAN links. The shared storage pools needed to be available 24 hours of the day but it was critical that any third party access should not impact on performance of its own processes – especially when working in projects with multiple contributors.
The Set-Up
To meet the workflow requirements of the project, Tyrell CCT implemented an Aspera Connect Server as the central traffic control between the Dublin Isilon cluster and the various production units located around Europe. Aspera’s innovative fasp technology is designed to overcome the latency, reliability and security issues of standard FTP transfers. With their high speed WAN links Egg is capable of simultaneously delivering massive amounts of data to both internal resources and production partners, with efficient and high-speed transfer performance, configurable bandwidth sharing policies and the ability to monitor and control target transfer rates.
"Tyrell CCT is excited to provide the mission critical applications and hardware to Egg for this high profile project," commented Bryan Malone, Managing Director, Tyrell CCT.
"The need to efficiently store and move vast quantities of data across the globe is increasingly becoming a day-to-day reality for Production and Post-Production facilities. With Isilon and Aspera the integration is very tight and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts."
The EMC Isilon solution was configured and up and running in a single day by a team from Tyrell CCT.
EGG said :"The EMC Isilon platform has proven its worth and allows us to have a single platform that is available to everybody within the organisation. It allows us to quickly move our file based rushes to where they are needed in an efficient workflow across the entire production – this is a much neater way of doing everything."
The new solution will help with post production work on SINBAD, an Impossible Pictures production for Sky 1 and BBC Worldwide that enhances the legendary adventures of Sinbad to a 21st century audience through spectacular special effects. Principal photography started in Malta in February 2011 for a scheduled premiere on Sky 1 HD in 2012.
"EGG Post Production is a great example of how Scale-out storage can empower content creators to work in new collaborative ways and still streamline workflows," said Rob Anderson, Chief Technology Officer EMEA, Isilon.
"As the creative industry moves further into exciting areas such high definition, 3D and interactive content - we will provide the storage foundation so customers like EGG can concentrate on creativity and avoid the headaches of complex big data infrastructure."
(LB)