Rendering Without Limits: How Qumulo Helped Hornet Boost Speed and Scale in AWS

The Challenge

For years, Hornet’s creative machine ran on a well-oiled, on-premises setup. Rendering and storage happened in-house, with a basic AWS render account acting as a supplemental resource. But there was a catch: there was no cloud storage syncing, and every file had to travel through a VPN bottleneck capped at 1.2 Gbps. What felt instantaneous in the studio, loading a file in seconds, could stretch into 30-minute waits in the cloud.

As projects grew in scope and multiple productions overlapped, the strain became impossible to ignore. Cloud workstations lagged, artists grew frustrated, and the old solution for scaling—renting and shipping physical machines—was eating up time, money, and energy. Shipping hardware back and forth was as much a logistical production as the creative work itself. The team knew that if AWS VDI was ever going to be a viable platform for production workloads, they needed a faster, leaner, and purpose-built solution for the cloud.

The Solution

That turning point came when Hornet joined forces with long-time partners AWS and Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) to chart a new course. During early discussions, IMT mentioned Qumulo’s cloud native file solution to a contact at AWS, and the idea quickly gained traction. Soon, the plan was set: move to a 100 percent cloud-based Qumulo cluster in AWS and finally give artists the speed they needed without tethering them to the studio.

“Initially, we adopted it purely for storage, expecting to handle our high-res images with Nuke VFX Composite Software,” said Gareth Porter, Head of Pipeline. “But we think it could actually go further and accelerate our workflow. If scrubbing through timelines and interacting with high-resolution footage became faster and more responsive, that would be an amazing and unexpected benefit.”
The setup is built for creative agility—Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) is mounted directly by virtual workstations and render nodes, eliminating the file transfer headaches of the past. Support for both SMB and NFS protocols concurrently allows Windows and Linux users to work side by side without friction, while cloud folder structures mirror Hornet’s existing project organization, so no one has to rethink how they work. Third-party tools like Maya (3D modeling and animation) and Houdini (visual effects) plug right in, and by implementing POSIX filesystem attributes through Active Directory, Hornet ensures permissions remain consistent across every platform.

The Deployment Journey

The migration was not just fast, it was smooth. In the first four days, the CNQ cluster was up and running in AWS. Two weeks later, the team had migrated and validated the data. Over the next three weeks, they tested the pipeline, fine-tuned performance, and confirmed everything worked at scale. All of it happened without a single moment of downtime as production rolled on, completely uninterrupted.

By the end of the six-week journey, Hornet’s artists could log into cloud desktops and work with the same speed and fluidity they enjoyed on-prem, only now with the ability to scale instantly for any project, anywhere in the world. What had once been a costly logistical puzzle became a seamless part of the creative process.