Games/Interactive

Avere Systems has established itself at the forefront of visual effects (VFX) production by providing studios with its NAS Edge filer technology to enable cloud adoption. Avere is used by the top VFX studios around the world to combat the challenges of working with large digital assets as they seek to produce top grossing blockbusters. The company will be showcasing its hybrid cloud technology during the annual SIGGRAPH conference, the media and entertainment industry’s premiere event on the theory and practice of computer graphics and interactive techniques, July 24 – 28 in Anaheim, California. While at the show, Avere will present alongside Google Cloud Platform and Moonbot Studios on how to use compute cloud rendering to create high-end special effects on a small studio budget.

Breaking Down Infrastructure Barriers to Achieve Oscar-Worthy VFX

As VFX studios increasingly turn to the cloud to support resource-intensive creative processes and meet production demands, Avere’s FXT Series Edge filers provide them with the flexibility to adopt the cloud at the right pace for their business while integrating public object, private object and existing NAS systems into a single, easy-to-manage infrastructure. With Avere, VFX studios can store data anywhere with little latency, making collaboration easier and minimizing the risk of production delays.

Some of the leading VFX studios that rely on Avere today to maximize their infrastructure include Arc Productions, Atomic Fiction, El Ranchito, Framestore, Image Engine, Illumination Mac Guff, Method Studios, MPC, Rising Sun Pictures and Sony Pictures Imageworks. In 2015, every film nominated for an Oscar in the visual effects category was rendered using Avere’s technology, and each of the top 20 grossing global blockbusters used special effects made possible by Avere, including hits such as Jurassic World, Minions and The Martian.

Avere Customers Achieve Unmatched Throughput Speed and Performance

The combination of Avere and the public cloud enables studios to reduce the amount of development work needed to move workloads to cloud-based render farms and to use caching in the compute cloud, producing vast performance improvements in throughput between cloud compute and storage resources. On an average production day, Avere M&E customers are able to move 2.5 petabytes through Avere clusters at an average rate of 30 gigabytes per second, far outpacing previous infrastructure capabilities.

“As Avere continues to scale in the media and entertainment industry, we are committed to continually innovating to support VFX studios of all sizes,” said Ron Bianchini, CEO and president of Avere Systems. “We are proud of the technology and results we’ve delivered to the VFX community over the past year, and look forward to showcasing this work to M&E industry leaders at SIGGRAPH.”