Lots of animation / multimedia houses use workstations with 40Gbps+ adapters (40GbE or Infiniband) connecting to network storage.
It's done this way so people can connect to the storage that's appropriate for the task at hand.
Different projects can be stored on different SAN/NAS arrays , each specc'ed out according to the size/needs of the project.
eg a short run animation doesn't need the same storage capacity of a full length feature film. They may have similar throughput needs though. (Summarising here, but the general concept is ok)
So, lets say someone is a Flame editor (Flame generally has high bandwidth needs). They're working on project A for today. So they connect to the storage being used for that project from their workstation. The next day, they might be working on a different project, so will be connecting to a different set of storage.
Other people using different software will connect to the same storage for their tasks, but can have different latency/throughput needs.
Obviously, this isn't the approach taken by single person multimedia er... "houses". ;)
It's done this way so people can connect to the storage that's appropriate for the task at hand.
Different projects can be stored on different SAN/NAS arrays , each specc'ed out according to the size/needs of the project.
eg a short run animation doesn't need the same storage capacity of a full length feature film. They may have similar throughput needs though. (Summarising here, but the general concept is ok)
So, lets say someone is a Flame editor (Flame generally has high bandwidth needs). They're working on project A for today. So they connect to the storage being used for that project from their workstation. The next day, they might be working on a different project, so will be connecting to a different set of storage.
Other people using different software will connect to the same storage for their tasks, but can have different latency/throughput needs.
Obviously, this isn't the approach taken by single person multimedia er... "houses". ;)