Cutting edge servers, workstations and NAS devices – high capacity and high performance Cutting edge servers, workstations and NAS devices – high capacity and high performance solutions for 3D modelling and demanding rendering tasks solutions for 3D modelling and demanding rendering tasks
Fast, Flexible, Responsive, Hamilton Rentals empowers Atlantic Productions to stay on track with 3D rendering tasks.
Background
Cutting-edge Hardware Brings Projects to Life
A multi-award winning independent factual production company and pioneer in immersive storytelling, Atlantic Productions makes groundbreaking content for a variety of mediums. Everything from TV programmes to theatrical and IMAX films, apps, visual effects, immersive virtual reality and online interactive experiences.
Behind some of the most exciting advancements in VR, AR and AI storytelling, the company’s specialist production teams rely on cutting-edge hardware to bring their photo realistic projects to life.
“Our specialist divisions generate and process massive volumes of data on a daily basis. My job is to ensure each department has the dedicated resources it needs to hit project milestones in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible,” explains Steve Cullen, Head of IT at Atlantic.
The Requirement
Dealing with Demand Peaks
Handling multiple large scale programme and project commissions in parallel means that any delays to CGI or 3D rendering tasks risks compromising delivery targets and studio capacity. While Atlantic operates its own rendering farm facility, occasionally its studios need additional fire power to cope with complex rendering
projects that involve processing terabytes (TB) of data per programme episode.
“From time to time, I’m asked to provide additional resources at short notice. Rather than buying costly hardware to fulfil these short term requirements, I need to find other ways to satisfy these demand peaks”, says Steve
Rental: a cost-effective and responsive options
In these scenarios, rental is Steve’s solution of choice for two reasons. Firstly, it delivers against the pressing need for speed, with supplementary high end workstations, servers or storage arrays arriving onsite in a matter of days – or less. Secondly, it makes sound commercial sense.
“Renting allows us to allocate OPEX costs to individual projects and avoid budget overrides. We’re able to rent what we need, for as long as we need, and at a fixed cost. In other words, we’re not hampered by protracted procurement lead times or CAPEX costs for supplementary technology that will eventually be surplus to requirements,” continues Steve.
If Steve needs to temporarily scale up processing resources and give individual project teams all the fire power they need, he can turn to Hamilton Rentals.
The Solution
Flexibility and Customisation
Earlier this year, Steve needed to create a dedicated render node to handle 3D visualisations to support the production teams working on a newly commissioned project.
“It became clear that we would need to supplement our existing capacity for a period of six to eight months. However, renting capacity with a cloud server farm isn’t an option for us – when you’re dealing with 90TB of data per episode, the cost and complexity of initiating the internet bandwidth needed to seamlessly enable rapid upload/download links is simply too prohibitive,” says Steve.
The answer was to create an additional rendering node cluster within Atlantic’s own datacentre. That meant sourcing servers that offered all the processing power needed, in a form factor that was compatible with the company’s existing server racks.
“In this instance, I made a quick call to Hamilton Rentals, shared the specifications of the kit I was looking for – including the CPU and RAM requirements, agreed terms – and it arrived within a day or so.”
“At the close of the project, the production teams realised it would need the kit for an additional week and Hamilton extended the hire at short notice, with favourable terms. Once the rendering project closed, I simply packaged everything up and Hamilton collected the kit. It was as simple as that,” confirms Steve.
Why Hamilton Rentals
In an industry where ‘making the impossible, possible’ is a business as normal philosophy, partnering with a rental company that has a similar mindset and ethos is essential.
“In this past experience, I found that I could call Hamilton at the drop of a hat, ask for what I need, and it just happened. The whole process was incredibly smooth, the team are knowledgeable and understood the importance of accommodating the unique commercial pressures we were working under,” says Steve.
“Added to which, there are very few rental firms that carry the high-end resources we needed to cope with high intensity workloads we typically handle. Hamilton simply understood what we do, delivered what we asked and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. For me, that’s worth its weight in gold.”
