Blur Studio: Fueling High-Performance Animation with Qumulo

Blur Studio is a Los Angeles-based powerhouse in visual effects, animation, and cinematic storytelling. Known for its work on blockbuster video game trailers and Netflix’s award-winning anthology series Love, Death + Robots, the studio’s creative output is only matched by the scale of its data.

With over 500 systems rendering scenes across massive datasets, Blur needed a modern data platform that could deliver the performance, reliability, and scalability required to support it’s business. Its existing FreeBSD-based ZFS storage systems, while initially economical and performant, required complex manual management and were prone to failures and capacity constraints that slowed down production.

“Downtime meant hundreds of artists losing hours of work,” said Sean Cody, Head of Systems at Blur Studio. “We needed a solution that wouldn’t hold us back.”

Enter Qumulo.

To support its ever-growing project demands, Blur deployed a seven-node Qumulo cluster. The implementation was self-managed and smooth, with a phased transition designed to minimize outages and align with pipeline shifts. Now, all workloads are consolidated under Qumulo, giving the studio a centralized, high-performance data platform that’s ready to scale.

“When we hit the limits of internal storage management, we simply added another node—no downtime, no disruption.”

Qumulo’s features extend beyond speed and stability. Fine-grained snapshotting empowers teams to self-recover deleted files, while the Capacity Explorer gives production staff insight into storage usage without relying on IT. Using Qumulo’s file audit stream, Blur also optimized its in-house synchronization system for render mirroring and remote collaboration.

“The Capacity Explorer alone is a huge time-saver. We’ve given department leads the ability to self-manage storage growth on their projects.”

And then there’s the support.

“Qumulo’s support is the best I’ve experienced in the industry. They don’t make you crawl through tiers to get help. They’re responsive, collaborative, and open to unconventional use cases.”