Post-production company requirements fueling adoption of Tuxera Fusion SMB to enable real-time networked data access for VFX, animation, and other high-bandwidth studio operations

Ultra-fast Tuxera Fusion SMB software gives media and entertainment companies new power to realize their creative visions for ultra-high definition, high frame-rate video content.

Las Vegas, USA – 12 April, 2024 – Tuxera, the creator of software products for networked file management and transfer, today announced its network access technology is enabling media and entertainment companies to get more stunning and effects-laden video content more quickly from the editing suite to consumers’ screens.

The Tuxera Fusion SMB (formerly Fusion File Share by Tuxera™) server message block (SMB) server software for the Linux® operating environment is the secret key that unlocks the awesome power and performance trapped in today’s high-performance computing hardware and software-defined storage systems. Tuxera’s software opens up a bottleneck at the networked data access layer of the stack that post-production companies use to feed video to the editing suite. When Tuxera Fusion SMB replaces the standard SMB solutions that are normally loaded in storage infrastructure by default, the data transfer roadblock disappears.

Now, studio technicians can work on the most demanding editing and production processes in real time, even when processing uncompressed 8K 60 FPS content. The familiar experience of lag and downtime while editors wait for high-resolution video files to transfer across the network and load disappear, freeing time for studios to create the greatest possible video products and realize the most ambitious creative visions.

“When we originally tested Tuxera Fusion SMB, I had no idea what it was capable of,” says Veikko Ruuskanen, CEO of Toast Post Production Oy, a full-service post-production house in Helsinki, Finland. “We always prefer to play back raw material on our workstations in real time, regardless of the resolution or file format. Unfortunately, that was not always doable with equipment running Samba SMB server software. At times, we needed to create local caches which slowed down the workflow, frustrating both our artists and our clients. With the Tuxera Fusion SMB software, we found that we could instantly manage real-time transfers of the most demanding file types. The change was immediate.”

Beating industry performance standards for networked data access

The Tuxera Fusion SMB software provides a dramatic uplift in the speed, throughput, and reliability of networked data access for all workflows performed in media and entertainment studios, editing suites and post-production facilities, including:

• Color grading
• VFX
• Animation
• Motion tracking

With Tuxera Fusion SMB running on state-of-the-art hardware and software storage systems from Tuxera’s partners, studio technicians can perform concurrent processes such as color grading and video editing on raw 8K video feeds with no loss of definition, and with data throughput typically exceeding 10 GB/s.

“Just one simple change can unlock the full potential of your content storage and network bandwidth. Tuxera Fusion SMB – our high-performance SMB protocol solution – is transforming the work of production studios and video technicians in the media and entertainment industry, producing huge improvements in efficiency and productivity. We know that studios are putting heavy investments into the best workstations, the best effects software, the highest bandwidth networks, and the best storage hardware and software. All those investments essentially go to waste if at the protocol level the system cannot scale and deliver the needed throughput” said Antti Alila, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Tuxera. “Now technology will not get in the way of studios making whatever effects they can imagine.”

How Fusion works

Tuxera Fusion SMB connects the users of data over networks to storage servers, continuously providing high throughput while maintaining data integrity regardless of the status of the infrastructure over which data are transferred. The most widely used alternative to the open-source Samba software, Tuxera Fusion SMB offers up to 60x higher throughput and as much as 500% better scalability. Compatible with the SMB protocol up to version 3.1.1, Tuxera Fusion SMB also offers RDMA capability.

In addition, its scale-out feature enables the creation of parallel and scalable multi-SMB cluster service, providing faster throughput with low CPU and memory usage.

Internally validated test data demonstrate the superior performance of Tuxera Fusion SMB when handling multimedia workloads such as ultra-high definition video. The results were derived from a live staged concert set-up consisting of a 16K x 16K, 60 FPS video livestream to a giant display screen from 27 storage nodes via media servers with active-active scale-out SMB and storage clustering. The application required zero frame drops or latency, to give concert goers an uninterrupted, immersive viewing experience while maintaining throughput for an event lasting for several hours.

In a major storage provider’s cluster running Tuxera Fusion SMB with RDMA enabled, the file sharing system fully saturated the network with data transfers running at up to 412 GB/s. The Fusion SMB software’s low resource usage also enabled SMB service directly on the storage nodes, with no requirement for protocol nodes or extra hardware.

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TUXERA FUSION SMB