Bardel Entertainment Expands Locations and Storage to Power Worldwide Support for Animation Projects with Industry Leaders
Bardel Entertainment, a renowned Vancouver-based animation studio for over 30 years with over 500 staff and over 125 projects at any given time for top platforms like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Studios, and HBO, faced mounting data challenges as its productions grew. Their legacy file storage couldn’t keep pace with rising workloads, lacked analytics, and hindered staff productivity.
During a major studio relocation, Bardel migrated its 1.5PB production environment to Qumulo, rebuilding its network and data center with minimal downtime. Qumulo delivered high-performance, petabyte-scale storage on all-NVMe Supermicro hardware, along with real-time analytics that provided IT and production managers with visibility into data usage, project efficiency, and potential pipeline issues. This helped them quickly troubleshoot, forecast data growth, and optimize workflows.
Expanding Locations
Business was booming, and so they expanded to Montreal. It had a great talent pool locally and was closer to opportunities and talent in Europe. This strategic, graphic expansion presented new challenges in sharing data in a way that would enable teams in both locations to work on the same projects simultaneously, without data duplication, file conflicts, or file transfer delays. Qumulo again came to the rescue with its Cloud Data Fabric, a global namespace and intelligent caching solution.
“It is such a game changer. It provides a seamless way to collaborate on the same assets between different locations around the world,” according to Arash Roudafshan, Vice President of Technology, Bardel Entertainment. “A project that would have been region-bound is now global and can go to any resource anytime, anywhere.”
Going Hybrid
Bardel has also used Qumulo to become hybrid. They are backing up all their projects through Amazon S3 and Cohesity, streamlining archive retrieval and supporting fast asset recovery for every project. By designing their on-premises environment like a cloud platform and leveraging Qumulo’s flexibility across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, Bardel can scale with fluctuating production demands, maintain performance across a distributed workforce, and keep clients’ projects on schedule.
With Qumulo, Bardel has transformed its storage into a stable, scalable, analytics-driven, hybrid, worldwide platform—empowering its team to support bold, innovative animation projects now and into the future.
We can turn the dial, move resources around easily to support last-minute client changes or requests instead of saying ‘no,’ and understand the cost to execute them. With Qumulo’s help, we can achieve the things our clients want and execute well, which makes us more successful as a studio.
Industry:
Media & Entertainment
Use Case:
Worldwide animation production
Deployment:
On-premises on Supermicro + Cloud Data Fabric + CNQ on AWS hybrid deployment
Location:
Vancouver & Montreal Canada
Company Overview: Bardel Entertainment is a renowned Vancouver-based animation studio faced mounting data challenges as its productions grew both in number of projects and in production locations. They needed a storage solution that could easily expand in capacity and geographic locations while keeping agility and efficiency.
Why Qumulo:
- Superior real-time reporting and analytics
- High performance for the fastest editing, rendering, and scrubbing
- Global namespace spanning on-premises and cloud
- Intelligent predictive caching
- Easily cloud integration
Results:
- They can now use the best available talent wherever it is worldwide on any part of any project as needed, instantaneouly
- They can cost-effectively back up all their projects to the cloud
- Storage is no longer a liability but rather a force empowering their innovation and success
- 80% of their administrative/workflow hassle is now gone since they no longer have to plan for file transfers