ISILON HELPS ARTS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE AT BOURNEMOUTH OVERCOME STORAGE BOTTLENECKS FOR DEMANDING MEDIA PROJECTS

Published 8th February 2010

ISILON HELPS ARTS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE AT BOURNEMOUTH OVERCOME STORAGE BOTTLENECKS FOR DEMANDING MEDIA PROJECTS

Escape Studios successful implementation of Isilon Scale-out NAS solves capacity and performance issues while offering scalable foundation for Digital film environment.

UK — February 2nd, 2010 — Isilon® Systems (Nasdaq: ISLN) today announced the that the Arts University College at Bournemouth, an accredited and recognised ‘Centre of Excellence’ in film education and training and one of only seven such institutions in the UK, has successfully implemented an Isilon IQ solution to meet high intensity rendering and editing requirements and prepare for its transition to a high definition Digital film environment.

With Isilon, the Arts University College is benefiting from the intrinsic high availability offered by the Isilon Scale-out NAS deployment which can withstand drive failures without the loss of data, while offering easy archiving compatibility to the School’s second tier, lower performance storage platforms.

“We first saw Isilon in a well-known production house and we were extremely impressed by the implementation and how it was dealing with a high intensity and challenging environment.” explains Liam Scanlan, Reader in the Digital Environment and previously Director of the School of Media at The Arts University College at Bournemouth.

“We used it as our benchmark when comparing other possible solutions and could find nothing that quite matched it based on our requirements of performance, price and flexibility.” Scanlan, who previously worked for George Lucas at Industrial Light and Magic for a number of years, understands well the necessity for technology as part of the modern TV and Film industry.

The University College resources includes 16mm film and professional video cameras, two studios, eleven editing suites including an Avid ‘Nitris/DS’ suite, a sound recording studio, two ‘ProTools’ audio suites and a screening room. The University College is currently undertaking a major building programme to further enhance this provision including a likely move for the media department to more advanced Red-One digital cameras which means the sheer volume of data is also likely to expand dramatically in the near future.

“Our render farm (at peak periods) is in use almost 24 hours a day and the nature of our courses means that projects start and stop all year round with inevitable bottlenecks and deadlines,” explains Scanlan, “The render farm was previously served jobs from a rack of Dell PowerEdge storage arrays and these have proved very reliable but when multiple projects are on the go everything would slow significantly due to lack of performance from our storage farm to our compute cluster.”

Following a successful two week implementation and training schedule carried out by Escape Studios, the new 36TB Isilon Scale-out NAS went live at the University College at the end of 2009. “The difference was staggering” comments Scanlan, “We are now able to run multiple projects on the render farm and the Isilon cluster just handles it – we have yet to have a situation where our storage is the bottleneck.”

The Isilon Scale-out NAS uses multiple 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports aggregated into a 10 Gigabit Optical backbone, which serves the various media suites across the campus. “The success of the project means we are now looking at expanding the Isilon storage pool out to other areas of the University College,” explains Scanlan, “The flexibility means we can configure it for different environments with varying requirements for capacity or performance without having to worry about complex application integration issues.”

About Arts University College at Bournemouth
The Arts University College at Bournemouth is one of only ten-specialist higher education institutions in the UK devoted solely to the study of the arts. The University College has been offering specialist education for over a century and enjoys a strong reputation both nationally and internationally for providing the creative industries with practitioners of the future. All 2,500+ students are based within one attractive campus, which is a creative community where both staff and students share a commitment to the disciplines of art, design, media and performance. The University College is part of the Bournemouth Screen Academy, which was launched as a joint venture between the Arts University College at Bournemouth and Bournemouth University Media School in 2006, becoming a Skillset Screen and Media Academy in 2007. It is an accredited and recognised ‘Centre of Excellence’ in film education and training and is one of only seven such institutions in the UK. The Academy operates summer schools, work placements and master classes among other initiatives.

About Isilon Systems
Isilon Systems (Nasdaq: ISLN) is the proven leader in scale-out NAS. Isilon’s clustered storage and data management solutions drive unique business value for customers by maximizing the performance of their mission-critical applications, workflows, and processes. Isilon enables enterprises and research organizations worldwide to manage large and rapidly growing amounts of file-based data in a highly scalable, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective way. Information about Isilon can be found at http://www.isilon.com.

For More Information:
Anne Harding, The Message Machine (Isilon PR in the UK) +44 1895 631448, anne@themessagemachine.com