Cinesite Europe Ltd makes acquisition of an Isilon

Cinesite Europe Ltd, one of London’s leading visual effects houses has recently made the acquisition of an Isilon IQ4800i 3 node cluster through Ovation Data Systems.
Cinesite’s recent work includes: 'XMen: The Last Stand', 'V for Vendetta' and 'The Omen'.
Peter Robertshaw, Cinesite Technical Services Manager commented: “This purchase decision was made after two years of market research, long discussions with Isilon and on site evaluation of four competitive systems. The Isilon system proved itself with its stability, ease of setup, price-performance and simply the fact that it just worked.”
Robertshaw added: “Other vendors offered solutions which needed tweaking to work with subtly different data demands. From what we’ve seen so far the Isilon cluster scales very nicely both in terms of adding more cluster nodes and adapting to the number of clients accessing it. To date we have replaced a pair of servers with the Isilon cluster. Currently that is responsible for receiving 3D output and then serving it to 2D."
Prior to the Isilon purchase, Cinesite had served its hundreds of users and rendering needs from fifteen or more servers, each tasked to a particular aspect of image serving.
Meanwhile, Isilon are working hand in hand with Cinesite’s Technical Services team to develop an output which notifies their HSM of new or modified data.
Cinesite is one of the largest full-service visual effects and post production facilities in the world, providing services as diverse as digital effects, physical effects, model construction and unit photography, film scanning, laser recording and visual effects supervision.
(DS)