Hammerspace for Media and Entertainment: An Overview

By Jim Choumas, Vice President of Global Channel Sales at Hammerspace

Hammerspace is proud to give television and film creatives, content publishers, special effects artists, and corporate video producers the ability to securely work efficiently and effectively in a decentralized world. The workforce is increasingly working remotely and often is not local to their peers at headquarters nor the data center environments. 

Our technology enables remote creative teams to work with high-performance, local data at their workstations, wherever they reside. Our software-defined solution provides unified file access and automated data orchestration that spans otherwise incompatible storage types from any vendor, plus multiple locations, clouds, and cloud regions. 

Unlike solutions that shuffle file copies between incompatible storage types and distributed environments, Hammerspace creates a high-performance parallel global file system that seamlessly spans storage from any vendor, bridging silos, locations, and clouds.

Hammerspace software delivers a Global Data Environment to give users, applications, and cloud services local access to data, no matter where it’s stored. It is designed to help M&E artists to create, analyze, and manage creative projects from inception to collaboration, to archive across a decentralized environment.

Decentralized production stretches both resources and budget in multiple areas:

• Distributed Workforce – Hammerspace enables organizations to leverage remote talent with tools to orchestrate content to remote locations and provide low latency, local read/write access to global data.
• Metadata-Driven Workflows – Actionable Metadata-based policies enable complete control and lifecycle management of your content.  Define and enforce policies to meet access, cost, performance, locality, security, and protection objectives.
• Cost Control – Make all data accessible and available from any location with a high-performance parallel global file system, while simultaneously ensuring it is stored and protected on the most cost-effective storage tier.  
• Hybrid Cloud Storage and Burst Render Flexibility – Enable simple and automated hybrid cloud flexibility. Access the most available or most cost-effective compute resources and storage capacity across any cloud, any region, instantly.  Meet unforeseen peak demands and access new technologies.

Hammerspace Customer Case Study: Jellyfish Pictures 

Jellyfish Pictures is one of the most respected visual effects (VFX) and animation studios in the world,  employing more than 300 artists from two U.K. studios and offering remote work around the world. The Jellyfish team has done engaging and innovative work for blockbuster movies such as Lucas Films’ Star Wars series “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” “The Last Jedi,” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” and TV dramas including HBO’s “Watchmen,” Netflix’s “The Innocents” and “Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation.” 

Big Growth Takes Big Innovation 

The studio had a leg up on its competitors since it had virtualized all its locations in 2019. But giving high-performance, local access to content files, and collaborating between hundreds of artists working out of home offices located around the world was a new and even more difficult challenge. Not only were staff members suddenly working from home, but they were working from widely distributed home countries including the U.K., Canada, the U.S., and India.  

For Jellyfish to rapidly grow the business, it needed to adapt its technology architecture to allow them to recruit, and rapidly make productive, new artists from anywhere around the world to meet spiking demand. A related issue was the high cost of rendering workloads in more expensive cloud regions. Rendering in London or Los Angeles is significantly more expensive than in cloud regions located further from massive city centers.

To address these two problems, Jellyfish selected Hammerspace to unify access to on-premises and cloud computing/storage resources in a single global namespace. In so doing, Hammerspace creates a cross-platform parallel global file system capable of presenting remote data to artists with high-performance local access from wherever they work. 

This enabled Jellyfish to take on new VFX projects by rapidly bringing new teams online in Australia, India, and South Africa, who now had the same user experience local artists in London enjoy. 

Additionally, Hammerspace’s data orchestration capabilities, integrated with Autodesk ShotGrid, provided Jellyfish with significant cost savings for cloud rendering, automatically routing jobs to lower-cost cloud regions without creating multiple copies of data. 

The solution was seamless for the artists. As a project is triggered within ShotGrid to move files to render, Hammerspace automates back-end orchestration of hundreds of millions of files to the most cost-effective cloud region for rendering, without altering user workflows. 

With Hammerspace, users everywhere still see the same files in the same directories, as though all files were on local storage. The power of Hammerspace is the ability to present local access to distributed users,  meaning that everyone is working on the same datasets no matter where they are or on which storage type or location the data is located

Learn More

Find out how Hammerspace can help media and entertainment organizations create, analyze, and manage projects from inception to collaboration, to archive across a decentralized environment.

Contact us to set up a meeting and learn more about how Hammerspace can help you drive business value from your data and accomplish your digital transformation goals.

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