The Premier Storage Solution for Linux Render Farms and Linux-based VFX Production Pipelines

Data-intensive VFX pipelines demand powerful processing of complex assets with a mix of high-resolution live plates, complex rendered 3D geometry, and simulation effects like smoke and water. If your storage can’t keep up, deadlines suffer.

To date, scale-out NAS storage systems have been the storage of choice for Linux render farms. But they often leave render wranglers and administrators at their wits’ end when faced with rendering deadlines while watching their scale-out NAS bog down due to the exponentially increasing inter-node data transfer under load inherent in their design as they scale (see adjacent video).

Many render farm architects have looked at parallel file systems to eliminate scale-out NAS bottlenecks but have been put off by their notorious complexity, unreliability, and poor support. Panasas is unique in that it provides the rendering performance and scalability that only a parallel file system can deliver – thus eliminating rendering bottlenecks – but with the simplicity, reliability, and mission-critical support associated with enterprise scale-out NAS.

With Panasas, VFX studios can deploy render farm storage quickly, manage it effortlessly, scale on demand, and accelerate rendering times to meet the most aggressive deadlines.