BUCK is a global creative company that brings brands, stories, and experiences to life through art, design, and technology. Its clients include global brands like Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon, GitHub, Rivian, FedEx, Apple, and many more, and its services include 2D and 3D modeling for multimedia, creating immersive in-person experiences, branding, character design, and more. BUCK has roughly 800 full-time employees and freelance artists worldwide and operates out of five main offices in Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam, London, and Sydney.
At any given time, BUCK is managing 50 to 100 projects in its pipeline, and all of this adds up to large volumes of unstructured data that needs to be ingested, processed, and modified through collaborative workflows with demanding performance requirements.
The Need for a Single Global Namespace that is High-Performance and Storage Agnostic
Prior to implementing Hammerspace’s Global Data Platform, BUCK’s creative teams were more siloed. Each location used NAS storage from various vendors, and data was copied between sites manually or with tools like Resilio. The problem was, as BUCK’s business ramped in any given region, the team could not always quickly share data with geographically distributed offices, so this slowed down projects and often resulted in having to hire and ramp local freelance artists.
“When I joined BUCK, my vision was a single namespace – and the storage appliance used was beside the point,” said John Kleber, CTO at BUCK.
After evaluating alternative file system solutions and unsuccessfully trying for months to get a global namespace environment working, Kleber reached out to GPL Technologies, who introduced him to Hammerspace. For more than 20 years, GPL has designed IT solutions and data infrastructures for post-production facilities,VFX shops, feature film studios and game development houses. Its team of production IT specialists made the recommendation to BUCK about Hammerspace’s technology.
The experience with Hammerspace was immediately positive:
“We had our first Hammerspace cluster up and running in Los Angeles in about four hours and were doing local read/write speed tests,” said Kleber. “By day two, we had joined clusters in Los Angeles and New York and had effectively demonstrated a multi-site single namespace in less than two days.”
Hammerspace Provides a Solution for Multi-Site Collaboration at Scale so Projects Can Be Completed Faster
Hammerspace is now deployed at four of BUCK’s offices, creating a single global namespace that spans offices in Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam, and Sydney. Artists and data users across all locations are able to collaborate on the same files in a live file system, eliminating the problem of wrangling file copies between sites.
Hammerspace Creates a Single Global Namespace that Spans Four Sites and Multiple Storage Systems to Enable Global Collaboration at Scale.
This also has the benefit of enabling BUCK to leverage artists in different regions to collaborate on the same project, which was previously not possible. In other words, if the team in Amsterdam wins a new client, now artists in all of the geographic regions can collaborate on that project – so now projects can be completed faster, and more projects can be completed.
Hammerspace’s software provides high-performance data access using NFS, SMB, and S3 protocols. All protocols access the same underlying file system with a uniform security policy across all protocols. And because Hammerspace does not require a proprietary file system client, user and application integration is simple and does not require workflow changes.
Hammerspace Enables Use of Supermicro NVMe Servers and Existing NAS Storage as Part of a Single File System
Hammerspace is used for all “heavy lift” workloads at BUCK including editing, rendering, and more, acting as highperformance shared storage that spans sites and different storage tiers.
Data that requires the highest performance is stored on NVMe servers from Supermicro, which BUCK was already using in-house. And Hammerspace also enables BUCK to reuse and repurpose its existing NAS systems as lowercost tier 2 storage.
According to Kleber: “We are draining off the old NAS storage by assimilating that data into Hammerspace, then we will repurpose that storage as lower-cost tier 2 storage.”
All of the storage is managed by Hammerspace, all part of a single file system that spans sites, clouds, and storage systems.
A Future-Proof, Data-Centric Architecture Means Flexibility for an Unpredictable Future
When asked what’s next for BUCK, Kleber emphasized the flexibility of Hammerspace, knowing that artificial intelligence (AI) will have implications for BUCK’s infrastructure and business as a whole. But right now the goal is to “make this global company actually function like a global company, with operational excellence at every point in the infrastructure chain,” explained Kleber, and “Hammerspace is a key element in making that a reality.
“Hammerspace allows us to operate our business the way we want to, which is about scale and efficiency. We don’t have to conform our business to a storage appliance mindset.”