Growing Depots with PowerScale OneFS and Perforce Helix Core
Download PDFFri, 02 Feb 2024 22:58:16 -0000
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Ever increasing demand for content
Game development companies are facing increasingly difficult data challenges, accelerated by two primary drivers. On one hand, their data continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, driven by increasing fidelity, higher resolutions, and the sheer volume of content being produced to meet gamers’ insatiable demands. On the other hand, if that data were to become inaccessible to the development team and creatives working on game assets, your project would be held up due to fundamental capacity management issues.
Scale without limits
This solution brings together the most trusted name in media storage – PowerScale (formerly Isilon) – and Perforce Helix Core, arguably the most trusted and widely used software version control system on the planet.
To help navigate change management and bring together the creative output of your teams, Perforce Helix Core gives teams of all sizes visibility and traceability into their projects and provides the Single Source of Truth that enables small teams to become more powerful and large teams to become more nimble. Helix Core offers stability to branching practices in distributed environments, full change traceability with secure asset versioning, and a scalable architecture suited to both artists and developers alike.
With your depots on PowerScale OneFS, you can scale their capacity nearly instantaneously without disruption to the running Helix Core application and without needing to schedule downtime of a studio.
Additionally, utilizing technologies like NFS over RDMA and nconnect for NFS directly to PowerScale from Helix Core servers, we can deliver extreme single stream throughput speeds, ensuring that your Helix Core server is able to access versioned data in the fastest possible time.
Game development at scale
Combining Perforce Helix Core with PowerScale scale-out storage enables you to hit your deadlines and realize your creative visions with a joint solution catered to artists, developers, and system administrators alike.
The joint solution of Helix Core and PowerScale accelerates workflows, supporting automated environments with tens of thousands of users running millions of daily transactions over petabytes of data.
Version large files of any type with Helix Core and Dell PowerScale, including code, config files, and large binaries. Developers can version and store everything – even in repos that can scale from hundreds of terabytes of data to petabytes in the same namespace – with no impact on system performance.
Feel secure knowing your successes can never outgrow the Helix Core and PowerScale storage system. Iterating fast, experimenting, and trying stuff out is just as much a priority to us as it is to you.
Additional benefits
PowerScale’s ‘Scale-Out’ architecture allows attached depots to grow seamlessly up to petabytes in a single namespace while remaining continuously online with no impact to servers or clients, bypassing the traditional constraints of having to upgrade an entire array or head, migrate LUNs, re-stripe data, concatenate LUNs, or expand dynamic volumes simply by allowing you to grow the entire filesystem on the fly.
Helix Core clients can also host their workspaces in NFS on PowerScale, which enables artists to work on their assets directly from the storage as if it were local without having to move data up and down between the server and their local machine’s workspace directory. Additionally, resources like build farms can access a shared NFS workspace so that only a single check-out is required to serve all builders.
Solution benefits
Scalable data management
Accelerate workflows. Nothing slows it down — automated environments, tens of thousands of users, millions of daily transactions, terabytes of data, etc.
Large files, all files
Version large files of any type, including code, config files, and large binaries. Developers can version everything — even in repos approaching hundreds of TB of data and 25 million files — with no impact on system performance.
Industry standard tool for artists
Give designers freedom to version art files quickly and easily from their preferred design tools while keeping all project files in a single source of truth.
One backlog that scales
Know your scope and prevent creep. Refine, prioritize, estimate, and give any other custom attribute to your deliverables.
Perforce Helix Core
Perforce Helix Core is the leading version control system for teams who need to accelerate innovation at scale. Store and track changes to all your digital assets, from source code to binary to IPs. Connect your teams and empower them to move faster and build better.
Dell Technologies
At Dell Technologies, we believe great storytelling comes from creative people empowered by advanced technology. Our solutions for storytellers span the workflow, built with leading technologies across storage, servers, networking, workstations, displays, and partnerships with key media software and services vendors. These solutions provide media professionals with the foundation to continue driving innovation without technology getting in the way of the art, so they can deliver more powerful stories faster.
Author: Andy Copeland, Global Solutions Architect - Media & Entertainment