Toybox: High Performance Network Storage

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Toybox is a New Zealand based design, animation, and visual effects studio. Working with leading companies, agencies, producers and directors, the company has produced recognizable work including Air New Zealand’s ‘The Hobbit – the Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made,’ the teaser of the TV show ‘Filthy Rich’, and advertisement for Arnott’s Shapes and TAB Rollercoaster.

The Challenges

Toybox previously had a SAN system in place that was reaching its end of life, so required a system that would provide all the features the SAN provided and more, preferably at a price that would not break the bank.

As a post production company, their data needed to stay readily available online for all workstations to access, and the system should have the ability to scale up to meet the every growing storage needs of the industry. Moreover, with the advent of 4K content, 10GbE support was essential to ensure the performance when transferring such data.

The Solution

LANWorx who are Toybox’s Managed Services provider contacted VST, a national data storage distributor in New Zealand. They eventually decided on a Synology RS3614xs+ rackmount NAS server to tackle the aforementioned problems.

The Result

The RS3614xs+ came with dual PCIe slots which allowed the installation of two 10GbE Network Interface Cards (NIC) that in total provided four 10GbE ports, giving their workstations more than enough bandwidth to handle ultra high resolution materials. ‘When we started using the RS3614xs+ to serve all of our 3D CGI animators and the render farm, we saw significantly improved performance straight away,’ commented Bruce Carter, head of Toybox.

With the possibility to expand to 36 hard drives, RS3614xs+ enabled Toybox to add more storage space as their data and business grow, instead of having to make the entire investment at the start. The company also used its large capacity to automatically backup critical systems and workstations. ‘The Time-machine function is so handy and easy to use that we use it to backup all of our Mac Avid Editing and Resolve Color-Grading systems,’ Carter said.

To sum all of this up, the Synology RS3614xs+ solved two problems for Toybox that were commonly seen in the industry: it gave them the power and speed to make all data – especially large 4K content – accessible online by all devices; it also provided huge storage space that would be able to accommodate the file storage and backup requirements for many years to come. Both of these were achieved through a solution that was easy to maintain, easy to use, and didn’t come close to blowing the budget.

‘The next step for us is to purchase a second system that can be used to serve other departments and be used for folder synchronisation so that we can have that extra layer of redundancy,’ Carter added.