Big Animation Dreams Mean Big Storage Needs
When a Vancouver-based boutique animation studio outgrew its consumer-grade storage when it took on bigger projects for film, TV, and commercials, it looked to a more scalable solution.
Edited by EE Staff
Film and TV
Nov 17, 2025
Od Studios (Vancouver, BC) started as a boutique visual effects studio with an aim to produce full length animated feature films using the latest technology and production practices. In the video production industry, great work can lead to more work—which means more generated data, and subsequently, the need for more storage. To reach their goal, they knew that they could no longer get by with their older consumer-grade storage solution.
Od Studios generates a significant amount of data during production. Their product is the data they produce. Their efficiency was impacted by the low throughput of their previous consumer grade hardware solution. As they grow, the projects they work on become higher profile and their need to produce high quality work increases. Od Studios required a stable solution to finish projects on time and on budget.
They needed a storage solution that would allow them to scale and provide them with the flexibility to resolve their specific problems. As a relatively new company, they had been using a product that only offered mediocre throughput that constrained their ability to produce work quickly. The system was slow, and they constantly questioned how many days remained until they pushed the system to failure.
As a newer studio with a limited budget, total cost of ownership (TCO) was very high on their list of requirements. They needed to balance affordability with throughput and stability yet wanted flexibility to allow for scaling and future growth. They began researching hardware vendors for a replacement solution, considering Seagate along with competitors that are traditionally used to provide storage solutions in the animation/visual effects production industry. Od Studios wanted the ability to install whichever vendor’s drives they chose, as well as to use the Lustre file system software they selected. They believed that they could achieve performance that was as good as, if not better than, many of the proprietary systems in the market.
In the early part of their selection process, Od Studios appreciated that Seagate’s storage options were different than competitors that locked customers into a single, one size fits all solution where the hardware appliance, installed drives, and software are provided by one single vendor. That’s why the studio chose Seagate’s Exos™ X 5U84 RAID array that provided them with future flexibility and minimal vendor lock-in—a solution that gives them the flexibility to pivot should they ever need to.
The 5U84 provides room to grow through a versatile architecture that opimzes TCO for petabyte-scale storage with industry-leading density. Plus, Od Studios can get its data to applications when and where it’s needed with high-speed, high-performance storage. The secure hard drives provide reduced power consumption and adaptive cooling technology to help Od Studios realize cost and energy savings.
The 5U84 is placed behind a Dell server which serves as the Lustre file system’s object storage service (OSS). A second Dell server is used for the Lustre metadata service (MDS). Due to the Seagate array’s design, Od Studios can scale out their system in different ways as needed—although with its extremely large capacity it may be a while before that happens.
Another benefit for Od Studios is how the ADAPT RAID on the array allows for rapid rebuild times in case of drive loss. In addition, the ability to use preferred drives in the array, along with using a scalable software-defined storage solution like Lustre, provides Od Studios with the flexibility, scalability, and performance they need out of their storage system.
Today, in addition to films, Od Studios also works on TV series and commercials. Its clients include Netflix, Amazon Prime, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Warner Bros., Marvel, and NBC. According to Od Studios Founder and Visual Effects Supervisor, Marc Horsfield, “The ability to scale out is a big win. With Seagate’s Exos X 5U84, we have options to scale, and that flexibility is paramount in an ever-changing industry.”
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