Entropy Studio

Background

Entropy Studio is a company in Aragon, Spain, that has become a leader in the Spanish visual effects industry. With over 20 years of experience, Entropy Studio offer a solution on post-production processes: from design to 3D animation, through the supervision and creation of visual effects for film, TV, and advertising. Their motivations are based on the purest of passions: loving cinema and feeling an absolute fascination for creating visual effects far beyond what reality allows.

Previous challenges

Entropy Studio faced two major problems: limited storage space and data transfer speed. Although they had a large storage capacity in local servers, when projects overlap or are delayed, their IT department had to move data from one server to another or even upload them to the cloud, which required time and bandwidth.

Solution

Thanks to QNAP's HybridMount application, they have decisively solved this problem. HybridMount has allowed them to manage all of their storage spaces: remote servers or clouds such as Dropbox using a cloud gateway.

Entropy Studio chose the TVS-672X NAS with an Intel® Core™ i3 processor and 8GB RAM. They created a thick volume with six 4TB Toshiba NAS hard drives in RAID 5, to avoid losing data in case any disk failure. Two 256GB high-speed M.2 NVMe SSDs are used for Qtier, QNAP's auto-tiering technology, to achieve faster data access speeds.

To work comfortably with projects, they used around 14 TB volume as a cache for the cloud gateway. The data transfer speed, thanks to its two built-in 10GbE ports, achieves rates of 600 MB/s locally and 20-30 MB/s to the cloud.

Through the File Station application, using the "cache status" option, they decide which data they want to have stored and synchronized on the local QNAP NAS and which should remain in the cloud.

Result

“Besides gaining fast cloud access, we also set to sync NAS data to the cloud with Hybrid Backup Sync, enabling us to share data with clients very easily. It does not affect bandwidth in our office network.” said Ángel Trinchán, IT Manager of Entropy Studio, adding “QNAP also allows us to reduce manual backup tasks because we set to copy the NAS data to the clouds in real-time when changes are made. Previously, we backed up NAS data at midnight, therefore in the case that some staff accidentally created or deleted data when backup was processing, we had no option to recover it.”

With the arrival of the TVS-672X, they also repurposed a previous QNAP NAS for use in a secondary role: file server, hosting virtual machines, administration, and databases.