The Jim Henson Company

SUCCESS STORY

Demonstrating the Audacity of Innovation Best known as creators of the Muppets and Sesame Street characters, The Jim Henson Company has been an established leader in family entertainment for more than 50 years. Less well known is the fact that in the company’s headquarters, behind the walls of the historic Charlie Chaplin Studios in Los Angeles, lies some of the most innovative puppetry, animatronics, and digital animation anywhere.

The company’s engineers and artists up against the limits of traditional storage EXECUTIVE SUMMARY have been exploring new ways to networks. Both traditional and digital take puppetry to the next level with a puppetry generates terabytes (TBs) of Challenge Remove the limits to creativity and timely proprietary workstation with advanced video footage. Each day, hours of footage content development while accelerating simulation capabilities driven by the must be downloaded to servers from a large data transfers and improving editing Company’s own animation software disc attached to the video camera. This productivity engine. The workstation uses a joystick process could take up to eight hours. Four and a digital glove, enabling puppeteers or five editors typically work in unison to Solution to manipulate a digital puppet exactly like create a show, which requires moving TBs ••Brocade VDX 6740 Switches as core of IP storage network used for editing they would with a physical puppet. Using of data across the storage network. While the workstation, puppeteers can perform content is transferred, editors cannot edit. Brocade VCS Fabric technology to •• in a digital environment that completely Eliminating any latency in file transfer adds simplify scalability replicates a three-camera, live-action time to the creative process and allows the Results video shoot. editors to put more ideas onto the screen. ••Reduced data download time from eight hours to less than 30 minutes “With our workstations, our human Demanding production schedules added puppeteers can interact and perform more pressure. Some projects are topical, ••Increased production efficiency by enabling multiple editors to work in real time, which enables that recorded one or two days before airing simultaneously spontaneous creative spark,” said Steffen on television. Moving footage to a server, Wild, Visual Effects Supervisor for Jim editing it, and delivering it to the television ••Increased lead times and achieved higher visual and editorial quality Henson’s Creature Shop at The Jim network requires an ultra-efficient Henson Company. “We’re always looking workflow to meet deadlines. Dramatically improved products’ time •• for ways to be faster and more efficient, to market “Today’s visual effects industry needs 10 and also to help drive the creative part of Enabled spontaneous creativity with a Gbps network capabilities at minimum,” •• our work forward.” real-time collaborative environment said Jorg Mohnen, Systems Engineer ••Built a foundation featuring simple As The Jim Henson Company pushes the at The Jim Henson Company. “Not only deployment and high scalability for boundaries of innovation, it was coming must the network be fast, storage must future expansion WHY BROCADE There’s an enabling factor through Brocade technology. We can move data faster and communicate in new ways. And we can tell stories in even more compelling, more magical ways than we’ve been able to do before. — Steffen Wild, Visual Effects Supervisor for the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop at The Jim Henson Company

keep up with these speeds. Everything two banks of 100-percent flash storage must be tied together with fast throughput devices—one bank is 32 TB and the and a technology environment that stays other is 16 TB—connected through high- hidden in the background.” throughput links directly to a Brocade® VDX® Switch solution. Using a technique Changing the Game at Every known as Network Attached Memory, the Level storage enables data delivery of 40 Gbps While looking for a way to dramatically directly to the network. improve productivity and enhance creativity, The Jim Henson Company The Brocade VDX solution has four team met Paul Evans of the Daystrom 40 GbE ports and 48 10 GbE ports, Technology Group and found a co- which support 20 rendering stations, conspirator in creativity. Daystrom 10 artists, and the high-capacity flash Technology Group provides innovative storage drives. The Brocade switches are scalable storage, data automation, and designed to enable customers to shift to open platform solutions. It embraces open environments built for the New IP, where systems and software-defined solutions they can leverage advanced software that enable their clients to break through and virtualization capabilities needed for technology limitations. their businesses. And the Brocade VDX switches include Brocade VCS® Fabric “The Jim Henson Company needed a technology, which greatly simplifies radically different IP storage network,” provisioning and management, allowing said Paul Evans, Principal Architect at The Jim Henson Company to easily Daystrom. “It had to support Remote expand the network to connect other Direct Memory Access (RDMA) for low- locations across their campus. latency networking and optimizing flash storage. And it had to be able to scale any Setting a New Standard for way that The Jim Henson Company might Efficiency want to scale in the future.” The new Brocade technology now enables four editors to work in real time Daystrom recommended flash storage and concurrently while TBs of data move devices that connect directly to a network across the storage network. With the switch. The IP storage network includes shared data pool and network, editors can

2 share the same timeline to meet deadlines example, now the studio can create highly characters and then perform them in more easily. The shared resources are topical episodes even faster. A news event an organic, improvisational way that also more cost-effective because they on Tuesday might inspire an episode than can connect with audiences at home. spread storage and network costs across can now be aired the next day, increasing Because we can create in real time, we more workstations and groups. the relevance of the show for viewers. bring a spontaneous element back into something that is usually perceived as “Before we would be fighting our In addition, artists now can spend more technical. Characters are performer- machinery just to get the episode out time focusing on the visual “look” of a driven, so when inspiration strikes, they the door,” said Ryan Etter, Editor at The show. Now they are able to achieve a level can add to their performances in ways that Jim Henson Company. “Having a shared of visual quality that was reserved only for we didn’t even think of before.” data pool allows us to move much more feature films eight to ten years ago. efficiently and try new things. It’s incredibly Simple to Deploy and Scale important to have a system that scales up Demolishing Barriers to Creativity Meanwhile, behind the scenes the new with our production schedule.” The Jim Henson Company is leveraging Brocade solution powers the bandwidth- its digital platform, network-attached Low-latency data transfer from the intensive creative process with efficiency flash storage and low-latency network storage network also solved an ongoing and resilience. The new flash storage to achieve new heights of creativity that issue with rendering. “If somebody decks dramatically reduced the amount of were simply not possible before. For was rendering or doing a backup rack space needed to fit huge data stores example, a single half-hour television simultaneously, we’d have truncated into a limited studio space. show using traditional animation takes footage,” said Mohnen. “By sharing approximately six months to produce. “It was simple to set the switch up and it’s data from a single network, editors can With the new Brocade technology, the extremely robust,” said Mohnen. “It has watch playback in real time instead of Company will be able to produce more never failed in production. Besides its piecemeal, thus ensuring a better-quality than 40 half-hour episodes of CG reliability, the Brocade solution will enable final product.” animation per year using the Henson us to scale. Digital Puppetry Studio, and all right in Pushing Visual and Editorial Fueling More Innovation Boundaries the studio’s Los Angeles location. Storytelling has always been a part of The High-speed storage and networking “Our digital environment is a creative Jim Henson Company, and the Henson reduced data transfers from hours to less technical playground for all of us,” said Digital Puppetry Studio provides an even than 30 minutes, freeing significant blocks Wild. “It allows us to look at things in more dynamic way to tell stories. And it of time for more productive work. For a playful way. We create meaningful doesn’t stop there. Using Brocade will enable the company to expand use of the solution into editorial, pre-production, and post-production activities.

“There’s an enabling factor through Brocade’s technology,” said Wild. “We can move data faster and communicate in new ways. And we can tell stories in even more compelling, more magical ways than we’ve been able to do before.”

3 The giant leap forward at The Jim Henson Company is also occurring wherever organizations are using Brocade solutions to create large, real-time collaborative environments.

“Brocade is already making the paradigm shift from physical to virtual environments,” said Evans. “And we’re doing it together with customers. The same storage and network advances that are creating digital puppetry can fuel simulation and visualization anywhere. It might have started with entertainment, but it’s the way of the future for higher education, the military, healthcare, automotive, life sciences, medicine—you name it.”

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