Absolute has outsourced its production IT requirements to ERA’s hosted services.
The resulting infrastructure was built to save power consumption and space, whilst providing Absolute with significantly faster scalability.
The visual effects company specialises in TV advertisements, music videos, films and digital media, with a full service facility with grading, 2D, 3D, editorial and sound design services.
The technology is designed to enable Absolute to efficiently manage new, bandwidth-hungry technology. As a result, the company is relocating all of its production IT infrastructure to ERA’s secure data centre, including storage (based on PixitMedia PixStor), workstations, rendering and Cisco networking.
ERA will assume responsibility for secure and reliable connectivity and performance, providing remote access to hardware via direct dark fibre. Absolute will continue to hold responsibility for all day-to-day applications and user configurations.
This new service is known to Absolute as CTRL (Creative Technology in a Remote Location).
“The financial benefits of this are obvious,” said Dan Bennett (pictured), Absolute’s managing director. “The cost of power and cooling as well as office space are of importance, but what was key to us engaging in this solution was the scalability and flexibility it offers our business.”
With increasingly sophisticated CGI and rendering requirements, Absolute required a faster and more efficient way to ramp up for major projects. With ERA’s support, the company can cope with spikes in render/workstation usage and storage processing, for short periods to several months.
Bennett added, “Outsourcing our production IT infrastructure to ERA allows our business to be scalable on a level that is unprecedented in the visual effects industry.
“The new efficiencies this model delivers will enable us to work smarter and faster on every project and crucially space that was previously used to store kit will be transformed into two new colour grading suites, allowing us to offer more flexibility for our current client base and open our doors to grading for long form film and TV work.”
