Hibbert Ralph Upgrade With High-Speed Central Storage
In order to cope with an increasing workload and the demands of HD production, leading UK animation studio Hibbert Ralph Animation (HRA) has dramatically upgraded its D’Arblay Street facility, replacing the original fibre channel SAN with 24TB of Isilon IQ clustered storage, supplied through and supported by root6.
HRA’s editors working in a Final Cut environment plus a mix of macs and PCs 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 teething problems which were not entirely unexpected but root6 and Isilon worked together to solve the issues and the system has now bedded in extremely well.”
Established nearly thirty years ago, HRA is one of the UK’s most prominent and successful animation studios. The company has won over 90 top industry awards for its work in creating TV and cinema commercials, idents, logos, web animations and promos.
