ENTERTAINMENT

BlueArc today announced that leading digital film studio Rhythm & Hues chose BlueArc's Titan Storage System as the storage foundation for the company's visual effects work on the Walt Disney Pictures release, "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." The movie debuted in theaters nationwide Friday, December 9th, grossing an estimated $109.1 million worldwide in its opening weekend, leading the box office. For this classic children's fantasy, penned by renowned author C.S. Lewis in 1948, Rhythm & Hues worked for two full years producing the computer generated character animation and visual effects of Aslan the lion's performance, as well as other characters including the Gryphon, Minotaur and Centaurs, and the dramatic battle sequence at the film's conclusion. For the film, Rhythm & Hues provided 400 shots, using a production pipeline that included motion capture, modeling, rigging, animating, technical animation/fur, lighting, rendering and compositing. With graphics as complex as five million strands of hair in Aslan's mane, and thousands of individual computer generated characters fighting simultaneously, the load on the storage infrastructure was immense. BlueArc's Titan met these demands by providing a high performance storage infrastructure with high throughput and IOPS to speed artist access and increase render cluster performance. "For Narnia, Rhythm & Hues created characters that have more detail and required more collaboration than any project we have ever taken on before, and we were able to drive creativity without compromise with our BlueArc Titan," said Mark Brown, vice president of technology for Rhythm & Hues. "Titan lets our artists focus on their creative efforts, getting files faster, rendering faster, and improving collaboration -- which results in better visual effects." A customer of BlueArc since 2002, Rhythm & Hues has counted on BlueArc's high performance Titan storage systems at the heart of their creative production in a wide variety of films, commercials and television clips, enabling the studio's 500 digital artists to create effects with greater quality and realism while meeting rigid project deadlines. In all, Rhythm & Hues has more than 70 terabytes of BlueArc storage on site for the company's creative projects. "This film demonstrates the increasing complexity and sophistication of visual effects, which in turn creates more demanding storage requirements," said Steve Daheb, vice president of marketing for BlueArc. "BlueArc's Titan is leading the way in creating a stronger storage infrastructure for the special effects industry, raising the bar for performance, scalability and manageability." BlueArc's Titan Storage System is backed by a unique hardware-accelerated architecture that allows customers to scale their storage systems far beyond any other servers available on the market today. Titan allows a single file system to grow up to 256 terabytes and delivers throughput of up to 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps). The architecture adapts to changing application or capacity needs, thus simplifying management, accelerating productivity and protecting a customer's long-term investment.