GB Labs Teams Up With Aardman

Award-winning animation studio, Aardman, create film, broadcast, advertising and interactive entertainment. Their work includes Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run, to name but a few.

Aardman approached GB Labs initially because they were having problems with their existing SAN solution. Not only were upgrades disruptive to projects, but they also found that upgrading meant some of their hardware would become redundant.

The first stage of the project was to introduce Space Bridge which literally bridged the gap and recycled their existing fibre RAIDs.

Realising the power the Space Bridge product had achieved, discussions soon began internally with their CGI department who were having issues with their existing media storage. GB Labs were called in to do some testing on their network dataflow.

Testing was carried out with one of our SSD products and the results led us to recommend our HyperSpace solution for CGI, editing and render farm.

GB Labs installed a 3.2TB HyperSpace accelerator over 192TB of Space + HDD. Not only will this solution cater for their current requirements, but it is also expandable to 30TB acceleration over 2.3PB of HDD, making this solution future proof.

The solution serves more than 40 workstations using DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, Maya, 3ds Max, Adobe Creative Cloud and also the 25 node render farm.

GB Labs are delighted to have an ongoing relationship with Aardman, one of the best known names in global animation.

"The addition of Space + and Hyperspace to our production workflow has enabled us to join together our Edit, CGI & Render, and Grade Suite to access the same fast storage, with specific clients in each area connected over 10Gb/s links," said Paul Reeves, Aardman. "Our aging Edit SAN storage has been recycled and now connected into Bridge to allow us to continue to grow our offline and archive storage area as different projects require, and also allows for mix platforms on the client side."

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This article is also available to read at BFV online here, page 18.

(JP/MH)