Scaling up: the Orphanage adopts a shared file storage system to manage explosive growth.(Special section: storage in the studio)

The Orphanage, a San Francisco-based special effects studio, is no stranger to explosions. In fact, the company's nearly 200 artists--whose credits include the creation of 2D and 3D special effects for such feature films as HellBoy, The Day After Tomorrow, Sky Captain, Spy Kids 3-D, and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle--immerse themselves in the art of making explosions look more devastatingly real on screen.

The group's impressive arsenal of credits has led to an explosion of sorts within the company as well with staff growing from 20 employees approximately a year and a half ago to almost 200 today. And according to director of IT Nicholas McDowell, The Orphanage is just at the start of an exponential growth curve.

With ultimate plans for a staff of 500 to 600 employees, The Orphanage gives new meaning to the phrase "explosive growth." It also highlights how important it's been for McDowell and his four-person IT team to get the most use out of the company's current IT systems and storage--all while developing an underlying architecture that is easy to scale at a moment's notice.

EXPONENTIAL EXPANSION

The Orphanage's storage needs have also expanded exponentially since McDowell joined the company a few years back. Take the recent HellBoy special effects project that involved almost 10TB of storage capacity at its peak and more than 100 of The Orphanage's artists. "At one point during HellBoy, we were generating 500GB of new data per day," says McDowell.

When McDowell arrived, the studio had one Apple Xserve server and only 2TB of locally attached storage. Today, it has 18TB of storage in a core production system that consists of InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS cluster software and a storage area network (SAN) with nine SGI TP9100 disk arrays, each of which has a capacity of 2TB.

Presenting itself as a massive, scalable network-attached storage (NAS) device to clients on the network, the CXFS cluster has eight server nodes at the front of the SAN that act as NAS heads, with open-source Samba code to allow files from the SAN's shared file system to be saved or accessed elsewhere on the network via the CIFS or NFS protocols.