In Broadcast - June 2014 - 34

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 32 - JUNE 2014

N E W S

InFORM

Glassworks Chooses
PixStor Technology
F

ounded in 1996 and based in
Soho, London, Glassworks is
one of the creative industry's top
providers of visual effects and highend digital content.
From award-winning commercials
to ﬁlm, promos and digital material,
Glassworks' expertise and success
in computer animation, digital
effects, telecine and compositing
has facilitated the opening of ofﬁces
in Amsterdam and Barcelona in
recent years.
Pixit Media, a provider of
enterprise-ready storage, network
and archive solutions, and Mellanox
Technologies, a leading supplier
of high-performance, end-to-end
connectivity solutions for servers and
storage systems recently announced
that Glassworks has selected a
combined Pixit Media and Mellanox
solution to power its visual effects
(VFX) and post-production storage
and networking infrastructure.
Glassworks is using Mellanox's
end-to-end Virtual Protocol

34

Interconnect (VPI) solution, which
provides InﬁniBand and Ethernet
connectivity on the same wire, and
Pixit Media's PixStor technology
to increase the performance and
efficiency of its system without
needing to add servers. The solution
also future-proofs its infrastructure
for 4K workflows.
Glassworks, upgraded the storage
and networking architecture in its
Amsterdam ofﬁce to Pixit Media's
new PixStor solution. PixStor is
a uniﬁed, highly scalable storage
and networking architecture that
guarantees performance to an
unlimited number of ﬁle-sharing
or streaming clients from a single,
central storage location. PixStor
leverages Mellanox's end-toend FDR 56Gb/s InﬁniBand and
40/56Gb/s Ethernet interconnect
solutions with VPI technology
to provide a seamless, highperformance rate of media trafﬁc
from disk to desktop.
"The ability to share project data

Glassworks has opted for Pixit Media's PixStor technology

between creative departments
without the need for multiple,
proprietary storage systems will have
a big impact on our business, our
creative staff has instant access to
content, enabling quicker and more
elegant project collaboration at a
reduced cost. As an innovator in
an evolving industry, we need to be
ready to deliver 4K projects without
any further investment in our network.
It's a win-win." explains Will Isaac,
head of engineering at Glassworks.
Glassworks projects depend on
a collaborative workﬂow between
ofﬂine creative applications. These
projects require data assets to
be shared from a central file
repository as well as sent to clientattend ﬁnishing suites for grading
and editing projects that require
sustained playback streams

of high resolution sequences.
Traditionally, these projects
required large, time-consuming
data set transfers between the two
creative departments.
Upgrading its central storage and
network to PixStor with Mellanox VPI
technology allows Glassworks to
signiﬁcantly increase streaming rates
from the central storage, enabling
editing and grading suites to play
back simultaneous sequences
of 2K resolution material in realtime without the need for copying
data locally.
PixStor, in partnership with
Mellanox, can now scale to up to
8.5PB of useable storage capacity
and sustain over 20 streams of
uncompressed 4K DPX frame
sequences from a standard twostorage-node system.

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