Sony Pictures Imageworks is using Gear6's "CACHEfx" scalable caching appliances to accelerate image rendering for digital film production. The centralized caching solution delivers I/O response times under one half of a millisecond for applications running on thousands of processors.
Digital effects and animated film production require rapid processing of terabytes of data to create high quality visual effects. In particular, rendering applications involve millions of random I/O Operations per Second (IOPS) that can generate a heavy workload for traditional disk-based storage systems. Imageworks selected centralized storage caching from Gear6 to address IOPS and low latency needs.
Gear6's CACHEfx appliances attach to the network, centralize cache resources in a coherent pool of shared memory, and scale to terabyte levels. The company said that because the appliance serves data to applications from memory with very high throughput and extremely low latency, performance improves significantly over stand alone disk-based solutions. By delivering caching as a shared network service, data can be accessed simultaneously by thousands of clients with no modifications to existing applications, storage systems, or management software.
http://www.gear6.com
- In May 2007, Gear6, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, unveiled its "CACHEfx" line of scalable caching appliances designed to accelerate response times and throughput for a wide variety of demanding, cross-industry enterprise applications.
Gear6 said centralized storage caching extends to nearly all I/O intensive applications and those requiring immediate data access such as databases and transaction processing. Its CACHEfx appliances support a baseline of 250,000 I/O Operations per Second (IOPS), 16 Gbps of throughput, sub-millisecond response time and scale linearly to handle millions of IOPS. Its Reflex OS virtualizes appliance memory into a scalable coherent cache pool, optimizes data delivery through parallel I/O channels, and provides robust intelligent cache services. Initial products support NFS and include intuitive browser based management tools for comprehensive statistics and I/O profiling. Gear6's CACHEfx centralized storage caching solutions are available now starting at $400,000.
