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Hibbert Ralph upgrades with Isilon IQ

UK animation studio Hibbert Ralph Animation (HRA) has replaced its original fibre channel SAN with 24TB of Isilon IQ clustered storage, supplied through and supported by root6.

UK animation studio Hibbert Ralph Animation (HRA) has replaced its original fibre channel SAN with 24TB of Isilon IQ clustered storage, supplied through and supported by root6.

The new storage has been ordered in order to cope with an increasing workload and the demands of HD production. HRA’s editors work in a Final Cut environment on a mix of Macs and PCs and had already enjoyed more than five years of collaborative working on the original SAN, but the capacity of the central volume needed to be increased.

Neil Marsden, Head of Technical Operations at HRA takes up the story. “We have a highly scripted workflow and we needed a scalable solution that could cope with this, integrate with our Unix servers and, most importantly, be implemented as invisibly as possible. That’s quite a complex task. We work in uncompressed HD in the FC suites and use 2TB partitions on the current network for commercials work which is perfectly satisfactory but HRTv, our longer-form TV arm, required greater capacity. Beside the almost infinitely scalable volume, the Isilon Cluster will also give us faster throughput with 10Ge performance.

“Initially we had a few issues which were not entirely unexpected due to the complexity, but root6 and Isilon worked together to solve the issues and the system has now bedded in extremely well. We’re now exceptionally busy and I’m certain our previous configuration would have crashed and burned if we’d tried to throw this much at it!”

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