SAN MATEO. Calif BUSINESS WIRE)–HammerspaceToday, a pioneer in the Global Data Environment, Jellyfish Pictures announced that Hammerspace has been deployed by Jellyfish Pictures to further the company’s virtual studio strategy, and continue its massive business growth. The Hammerspace Global Data Environment allows content to be used in high-performance local access from artists wherever they are working. It also allows rendering to take place in any cloud region, without causing workflow inefficiencies or multiple copies. The deployment of Hammerspace has allowed Jellyfish to continue taking on new projects without worrying about finding enough local creative talent. The company saves an average of 20% on cloud rendering projects by enabling content, leveraging the most cost effective cloud compute region, and not worrying about where the content was made. If you need to burst render, the Hammerspace method can help you save millions each year.
Jellyfish Pictures is one the most respected visual effects and animation studios in the entire world. It employs more than 300 artists across two U.K studios and offers remote work around the world. The Jellyfish team has produced world-class projects, adding their talents and innovation to blockbuster movies like Lucasfilm’s Star Wars series. Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Last JediAnd Rogue One. The team also contributed to the recent Star Wars series addition. The Book of Boba Fett. Other TV credits include HBOs Watchmen, Netflix The InnocentsAnd Black Mirror: Hatred in the Nation Jellyfish has produced feature films in Animation Spirit: Untamed, How to train your dragon at home(DreamWorks Animation) as well as several top-rated children’s programs, all working under the motto “No borders.” Total Security. Certain Delivery
Hammerspace is a core component of the Jellyfish strategy vision. It allows us to expand our global workforce, increase our productivity, meet and exceed the expectations of our clients, and greatly reduce our costs at multiple levels. The intelligence of Hammerspace solutions gives us far greater control over our data, and provides quantifiable, tangible value to the business.
Innovation can improve operational efficiency
Jellyfish Pictures’ virtual transformation began in 2017. The company then went all-in and made a shift to virtual VFX in late 2019. The pandemic in early 2020 caused a halt in live shootings. This prompted a dramatic shift to remote work and increased demand for animation and special effect to keep TV and movie releases going. Jellyfish was the pioneer of virtual work in the sector; these shifts inspired Jellyfish’s expansion of technology capabilities to efficiently utilize a remote talent pool and accelerate its productivity of its new artists around to meet spiking demands.
Jellyfish’s workload grew, and so did the costs for infrastructure and computing resources. A typical rendering job requires thousands of GPUs and CPUs. Jellyfish needed to be able to use all of their compute power and also have the option to burst render to a more cost-effective cloud area. Hammerspace can be set up in any new cloud region within minutes. It is much more expensive to render in Los Angeles or London than in other cloud regions that are closer to major cities. Jellyfish Pictures has partnered with Azure, Hammerspace to transparently manage content for a growing workforce and to enable cost-effective renders in a variety of geographical cloud regions.
Hammerspace allows you to choose the most economically-friendly geographic region for hosting data centers and cloud hosting. Smith cited a number of reasons why it is more cost-effective to use infrastructure from Montreal than Toronto or Los Angeles. Recent articleIn IT World CanadaAJ Byers CEO of Root Data Center stated: Montreal’s climate is able to increase the efficiency of cooling platforms used for computing systems housed within data centres that generate significant heat. In the industry, there is a concept called power usage effectiveness (PUE). It measures how much energy is needed to run a facility and how cool it is for every kilowatt of electricity used per computer. PUE has been a key element in data centres over the years. It drives the net cost for large-scale providers and has made it a crucial component.
Remote Data Access, Local Access at Last
Artists can work remotely with the tools they prefer while still having access to the content available in all locations via Hammerspace Global Data Environment. Hammerspace allows anyone, from any application to any location, to share the same data set and content repository. They can also have high-performance, local access to the content. Hammerspace is integrated to Autodesk ShotGrid, Jellyfish Pictures’ workflow management tool. This allows artists to effortlessly access the content that they need, wherever they are, using the workflow tools they know. Jellyfish can automate and optimize data mobility for millions of files through the powerful integration of Hammerspace and ShotGrid. This allows for massively simplified decentralized workflows.
Jellyfish also used Hammerspaces replication to improve its disaster recovery planning. This ensures that assets are always available for work in case of an outage.
Hammerspace’s main mission is to help decentralized organisations use their data when and where they need it. Douglas Fallstrom, senior vice-president of Product, Hammerspace, stated that Hammerspace’s primary mission is to help them do this. Data is always accessible to those who need it, and their applications, from desktops to servers to cloud. We don’t require multiple copies of the content. Wherever creative talent is located they can access their content from any location.
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About Hammerspace
Hammerspace provides a Global Data Environment which spans both on-prem data centers as well as public cloud infrastructure. Hammerspace was founded in Linux, NFS (open standards), flash and deep files system, and is the leader in data management technology. This makes Hammerspace the first and only company to provide a global solution for connecting users with their data and applications on any existing data center infrastructure, or public cloud services.
