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Home , Animal Logic, Happy Feet

Postgres-BDR is chosen, with 2ndQuadrant support, by global award-winning digital creative studio

Animal Logic is one of the world’s most creative Although total faith remained in PostgreSQL, digital studios producing award winning, the core product did not offer the replication groundbreaking , and functionality the team required. With a number design. of alternative add-on solutions available, the team had to find a solution that could provide With studios in , and Los the best outcome, with the right support. Angeles, Animal Logic has been the creative force behind many box office successes including creating the dancing animated The Solution in , the formidable fighting Animal Logic identified Postgres-BDR as a owls in Legend of the Guardians, BBC’s Walking candidate solution. Postgres-BDR is specifically with Dinosaurs 3D, and the hugely successful LEGO® designed for use in geographically distributed Movie franchise. clusters, using highly efficient asynchronous logical replication, supporting anything from 2 to more than 48 Animal Logic runs a custom production workflow system nodes in a distributed database. across two studios on two continents, supporting nearly 700 collaborating specialist artists who produce tens of thousands of digital components per day. A PostgreSQL database forms the backbone of this system, and Postgres- BDR (Bi-Directional Replication) allows the studios to work closely while still being able to operate independently - should the need arise. “Getting someone in to fill in the knowledge gaps was needed and having one of 2ndQuadrant’s replication experts to visit us on-site was excellent.” Justen Marshall, Software Development Manager, Animal Logic

The team approached 2ndQuadrant, as authors of Postgres- BDR, late in 2015, initially seeking advice. Confident they had found the right solution – and confident they could implement Postgres-BDR using in-house skills – the team proceeded with a project to evaluate BDR.

After 6 months of evaluation, the team was impressed with Postgres-BDR but had reached the boundaries of their knowledge. They concluded that whilst problem solving was at the heart of what this highly competent technical team does, the logical next step was to bring in the experts.

With the previous engagement positive, and indirect support The Challenge (whilst testing) coming from some of 2ndQuadrant’s experts Animal Logic has been using PostgreSQL as a core database - who contribute to various resources like community forums technology for many years. Visual effects and computer- - 2ndQuadrant was the obvious choice to assist. based animation are data-intensive crafts, with a critical dependency on data storage, access, and management. A lead 2ndQuadrant Consultant was invited to visit the With an established studio in Sydney and a new studio in Sydney studios to evaluate Animal Logic’s implementation of Vancouver coming on stream in 2015, the team started to BDR - as a prerequisite to performing an architectural health investigate the options available to them to establish a check and ensuring supportability for a Production Support globally distributed database infrastructure. contract to commence.

https://2ndQuadrant.com • [email protected] CASE STUDY 2ndQuadrant USA +1 650 378 1218 • 2ndQuadrant UK +44 (0)870 766 7756 The consultant chosen for the project happened to be one of the lead developers of BDR, which allowed him to make “Just like being able to phone a friend, it’s reassuring highly informed suggestions and decisions, leaving a strong to know we can put a ticket into 2ndQuadrant at any impact on the team. time. Depending on where we are in the production cycle, one day of outage could cost us $0.5million. Justen Marshall, Software Development Manager explains; That simply can’t happen.” “We had a BDR-related production outage whilst the engineer was on site. He was able to step in to assist and not only Animal Logic recently delivered work on The LEGO® resolve the problem but provide us with a solution that took Movie, The Great Wall and The Master: A LEGO® Ninjago 15-20 minutes. Had we gone with the fall-back approach of Short and is currently in production on Guardians of the rebuilding the cluster, the outage for our Vancouver studio Galaxy Vol. 2, Alien: Covenant, The LEGO® Ninjago Movie, would been more like 15 hours!” Peter Rabbit and The LEGO® Movie Sequel. With a strong slate of productions, Animal Logic continues to grow its 2ndQuadrant’s expert was able to boost the confidence in the global success. This will no doubt bring more attention team’s ability and also ensure that expertise was available and more business to this successful organization - and when needed. with more business comes more demands on the company and the technology infrastructure. Now that Postgres-BDR Following the consultancy work, the Animal Logic team has moved into a critical production environment, Animal was equally impressed with the architectural health check Logic has secured one part of their business; opting for 2ndQuadrant performed; revealing some interesting issues 2ndQuadrant’s Production Support service, providing 24/7, that were quickly resolved and provided some very obvious 365 days-a-year access to the PostgreSQL experts. performance improvements. Justen confirms, “When we applied the suggested parameters The cost of downtime can be significant for any business and we saw a productivity increase in server utilisation. in the case of Animal Logic, they are not taking any chances. This had a very real and positive impact on overall production productivity too.

Things that you get wrong might not hurt you but correcting it About 2ndQuadrant can make a big difference - that’s why you phone the experts.” 2ndQuadrant provides solutions for mission critical PostgreSQL databases. Our solutions ensure high availability, disaster recovery, backup & failover management & more.

We provide tools to make your deployment process simple and reliable. 2ndQuadrant is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the first Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) for PostgreSQL. With over 19 years of hands-on experience through client engagements, our engineers ensure your PostgreSQL solutions are fully supported in their production environment.

https://2ndQuadrant.com • [email protected] CASE STUDY 2ndQuadrant USA +1 650 378 1218 • 2ndQuadrant UK +44 (0)870 766 7756