Deluxe Australia Chooses Catapult for Demanding Pipelines
December 17, 2009
Source: XDT
XDT, developers of advanced software-based
solutions for digital film, announced that Deluxe Australia
has purchased the full suite of Catapult products including
Catapult 4K, Catapult Bridge and Flipstream for both its Sydney
and Melbourne facilities.
"We have extensively tested XDT's Catapult technology
and it has proven itself as a reliable product for our demanding
pipelines", says Anthos Simon, General Manager at Deluxe
Australia. "The way in which Catapult handles uncompressed
frame data has greatly increased our workflow options and
added significant value to quality control and data management."
Erik Otto, Managing Director of XDT, states, “We are
extremely proud to have Deluxe on board. Their reputation
for technical excellence is respected globally and our team
looks forward to working with both the Sydney and Melbourne
facilities."
Catapult 4K is an integrated solution consisting of an enterprise-grade,
redundant, 3RU server delivering a data rate in excess of
1200 Megabytes per second in RAID5 over 16 SATA HDDs with
XDT's unique Catapult Server software. Catapult 4K replaces
the need for dedicated review systems with direct attached
storage to deliver sufficient throughput. Real-time review
of uncompressed film resolution frame sequences is possible
direct from shared storage. Sequences can be reviewed by multiple
concurrent client workstations over Ethernet or InfiniBand.
Each Catapult system is capable of playing back two concurrent,
uncompressed 2K (10-bit DPX 4:3) streams over 6 Gigabit Ethernet
connections. A single system presents a highly efficient and
cost-effective way to review stereoscopic material. Catapult
4K is ideal for quickly moving frames off local attached storage
arrays and SANs. Data can be migrated over existing network
infrastructure at unprecedented speeds. Catapult also offers
support for Autodesk StoneArrays, allowing for direct access
to framestores.
Catapult 4K accelerates transfers between remote locations,
excelling with high bandwidth, high latency links. Catapult
allows easy frame quality assurance review, at full resolution,
from any Ethernet connected client, before commencing a WAN
transfer. Incoming frames on the receiving end can be reviewed
during the transfer, while XDT's Catapult protocol provides
up to 99% utilisation of available WAN bandwidth.
Catapult Bridge provides NFS and CIFS client access to frame
sequences stored on any Catapult system. Catapult's frame
sequence scheduling and prioritising is maintained while Catapult
Bridge is accessing files, allowing high-throughput streaming
frame access to operate concurrently with high-IOPS random
access.
A low latency (less than 50 microsecond), non-volatile cache
with extremely high IOPS (over 120,000 random read/write),
provides concurrent access operations for NFS and CIFS clients
at the level of a high-end SAN.
By employing aggressive frame level read-ahead, render node
CPU's are kept from stalling while waiting on network storage
I/O. Small block read/write operations from software renderers
are kept away from centralised storage until file access has
ceased. Intelligent frame level write-back ensures that sequences
are written back to Catapult in optimal order for streaming.
There is no need to re-order sequences.
Catapult Bridge enables facilities to extract the maximum
performance from their render farms whilst maintaining the
unique and powerful features of Catapult systems. Facilities
are now able to review incoming uncompressed rendered frames
in real-time without a further copy to a dedicated system.
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