Illumination's Bruno Mahe on why 'Minions' animation studio selected Avere cloud servers over Hitachi and EMC

Animation firm's head of technology explains how Avere Systems benefits production of films like the upcoming Minions

Illumination Mac Guff, the animation house behind Despicable Me and its upcoming Minions spinoff, has turned to Avere Systems' FXT Edge cloud solution to ensure its animators have all the computing resources they need, even when the studio is at its busiest.

The move, says Bruno Mahe, head of technology at Illumination Mac Guff, came about after the company realised its on-premise systems were unable to cope with the demands placed on them.

"During the peak period you need to make sure all the extra activity can be fed with the right data, and the primary storage had a finite amount of resources. So if you went beyond that point, everything stopped because it was saturated and it goes dark and you don't want that to happen," he explains.

When servers became overloaded, the animators had to stop working - a situation that obviously could not continue.

The solution was to transfer the rendering power behind the animation to cloud servers - allowing animators to spin up more resources at peak times. Avere's FXT Edge was selected after a two-month trial that saw a big improvement in the animators' productivity.

"It's actually easier to render a small amount of data now because it's done in the cloud. So if you look at the actual access to the primary storage, it could be zero. It's allowed us to be more responsive on a time-sensitive re-running of a shot," Mahe explains.

So how else has the move to Avere benefited the studio?

"Using cloud computer power with the dataset being local has always been possible but difficult to obtain, it wasn't a smooth process," Mahe says.

"But now it's possible. You can just use the cloud computing power and the data remains local. It's a seamless, smooth peak absorption system without changing your infrastructure."

In essence, the move has freed the studio's artists from their arch enemy: latency.

"Latency is important for the rendering but it's way more important for the artists because half a second is a long time, it's terrible, you can break the spirit of an artist if they have to wait every time," Mahe says.

Illumination's Bruno Mahe on why 'Minions' animation studio selected Avere cloud servers over Hitachi and EMC

Animation firm's head of technology explains how Avere Systems benefits production of films like the upcoming Minions

The specific demands of Illumination Mac Guff, Mahe tells Computing, meant that there were some vendors who the firm couldn't consider using.

"If you're using general-purpose storage like Hitachi or EMC, you don't always have the right toolset to understand what's going on in the storage," he says.

"One of the things that really made a difference with Avere is that they delivered the performance but they also came up with a real-time looking glass to actually understand what was going on."

Mahe says the Avere dashboard allows his IT team to examine and solve issues without disrupting the anaimators' work.

"Before Avere, we had to do repeated test cases, we had to simulate the environment to see what we could do. But now with Avere we can just open up the hood and look at what's going on real time, with no impact on production. That was a huge incentive for us," he says.

"It was hard for us to do it real-time – usually we wouldn't know there was a problem. But now, we can kill a potential problem before it impacts on production," Mahe adds.

Ultimately, deploying Avere's systems has made the production of films such as the upcoming Minions more efficient and less stressful for the rendering artists.

"We're always trying to optimise our renders, we want them as beautiful as possible, as fast as possible using the least memory as possible," Mahe concludes.