The combined offering enables fast, resilient and efficient storage for film, TV and VFX productions
WekaIO (Weka), one of the fastest-growing data platforms for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), life sciences research, and high-performance computing (HPC), and Arch Platform Technologies, provider of the Arch Platform, a SaaS solution to create and manage powerful, cloud-based studios for content creation, announced complete integration of the Weka cloud deployment with Arch’s studio-in-the-cloud platform. Now artists and studios can onramp to cloud-based creative production that allows companies to get to market quicker.
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“Designers and artists should be more concerned with having the ability to use the tools and applications that will best enable them to perform their jobs, rather than to worry about the details of the infrastructure that makes those resources available to them”
Purpose-built to create a high-quality, cloud-based platform for a leading visual effects studio that had a need to scale to the cloud, the Arch Platform is now used by multiple major Hollywood studios for post-production, virtual production, and other collaborative creative endeavors. The platform allows studios, networks, producers, and VFX companies to spin up powerful, cloud-based content creation facilities in minutes, as needed, with no upfront investment in infrastructure and no recurring capital expenses.
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Arch uses AWS to bring powerful, remote VFX virtual workstations, rendering, licensing servers, storage capabilities, and content workflow to artists and studios of all sizes and enables them to manage facility and project permissions in one virtual location or many connected ones around the world. The Arch Platform on AWS has enabled several post-production companies to be born entirely in the cloud. The company decided to integrate Weka into the platform to handle projects that required the speed, scalability, and resiliency needed to handle the high-performance requirements of media workflows. A key factor was Weka’s ability to support both Windows and Linux-based applications at very high-performance levels while collaborating on the same project.
“For any creative endeavor, you can spin up a couple of virtual workstations and render machines in AWS, but you still don’t have a robust, secure, extensible solution that you can utilize for your most demanding projects and workflows around the world,” said Laura Teodosio, CEO of Arch Platform Technologies. “The Arch Platform provides the underlying architecture, orchestration, and workflow pipeline that studios, networks, producers, and post-production companies need to quickly and easily get their projects up and running. The integration of Weka’s cloud native solution ensures the storage is fast, flexible, and efficient to drive a seamless experience for our customers’ most demanding cloud workloads.”
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The Weka File System (WekaFS™) is a POSIX-compliant file system that delivers high streaming bandwidth to media workflows while maintaining low latency across the storage cluster to accelerate application performance. It offers a multi-protocol support with full file shareability and file locking across different operating systems. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can access and share files from a single project, allowing for easy collaboration among creative teams. Weka is quickly and easily deployed from inside the Arch Platform’s SaaS-based dashboard so that users can be productive immediately without having to worry about configuring the underlying infrastructure.
“Designers and artists should be more concerned with having the ability to use the tools and applications that will best enable them to perform their jobs, rather than to worry about the details of the infrastructure that makes those resources available to them,” said Liran Zvibel, Co-founder and CEO at WekaIO. “By using a solution like Arch Platform Technologies has built, with Weka providing the file system, production companies and visual effects studios of all sizes can quickly and easily take advantage of the cloud to collaborate with teams from anywhere in the world, without having to first invest in the capital equipment to perform their job.”
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WekaFS, a cloud-native storage solution, enables high-performance computing at massive scale. Deploy Weka on any AWS instance that has local SSD or NVMe storage and dramatically improve file storage. Weka also enables users to take advantage of the elastic compute resources available in the cloud for massive scale. The WekaFS software can run on a portion of the instances while other compute-only instances can access the shared file system. Integration and transparent tiering to S3 provides best cost and infinite scale.
The Arch Platform is designed to accelerate the jump to the cloud with the seamless creation and management of fully resourced, digital content creation studios for VFX, post-production, virtual production, and other collaborative creative efforts – without requiring specific knowledge of AWS services and technology. Driven by an enterprise SaaS dashboard, Arch has created industry-standard and industry-tested configurations for creative resources and workflows, bringing the time needed to deploy a new cloud studio down to minutes, instead of days.
