XYi Design is a West End of London-based design agency creating and localising campaigns for many major film releases and a client list to die for including, DreamWorks, Warner Bros, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, MGM and Plan B.
The company prides itself on attention to detail and a quick turnaround with over 16,000 artworks across print, motion and digital delivered to clients in 2023 alone.
One prime example is Kung Fu Panda 4, who’s opening weekend is DreamWorks Animation’s biggest, with $58 million dollars, which took the franchise’s global box office to over $2 billion.*
For Universal Studios’ Oppenheimer, XYi Design adapted the original artwork, creating print and digital materials for this expansive project, capturing J. Robert Oppenheimer in all his glory, in a vast array of formats and sizes.
The adaption of original artwork into multiple sizes and formats and localisation into a variety of campaign media across materials and markets, requires storage capable of handling up to 120 Terabytes of assets, up to 1 Terabyte of changes daily and over a million files, and counting!
XYi Design has used GB Labs’ storage solutions since 2017 – it’s designers load and save files using applications from the Adobe Suite including Photoshop, InDesign and After Effects on their Apple Macs.
Technical Challenges
XYi Design was experiencing issues with equipment from other manufacturers, both in terms of storage and networking performance. In addition, their support queries were responded to erratically, which adversely affected studio throughput.
It was obvious that GB Labs understood the technical challenges faced by media production companies and that their equipment was built to perform in that environment.
As well as the proximity to GB Labs’ HQ in the UK, XYi Design’s confidence was further boosted by the ability to work directly through issues with GB Labs’ dedicated support engineers. With GB Labs’ remote support service, engineers ‘talk directly’ to a customer’s box and can be 99% effective, with guaranteed SLAs too.
The Solution
From an IT perspective, XYi Design was happy to have all their storage needs met by GB Labs and supported by its CoreOS, GB Labs’ own operating system, giving guaranteed interoperability between live, backup and archived data.
XYi Design was more than happy with GB Labs single point of contact approach and support from it’s “super-responsive support team”!
GB Labs provides quality equipment, backed by a support department that tirelessly works to eliminate any issues that crop up, said Matt Edgell, CEO, XYi Design.
XYi Design initially acquired a superfast FastNAS, which can ingest and edit 4K/8K video and data to post-production and long-term archive, at speeds up to 4000MB/s.
As XYi Design grew so did their storage requirements. By partnering with GB Labs, XYi Design was able to add to their existing infrastructure to boost capacity, performance, redundancy and business continuity.
SPACE+ and HyperSPACE for demanding online workflows
FastNAS F16 Nitro and EX unit for daily backups and failover
ECHO is a nearline target for scheduled Snapshots from SPACE+, with off-site replications sent to cloud storage through GB Labs’ CORE OS
VAULT for archiving to LTO-9 for ultimate protection and achieving the 3-2-1-1 gold standard of data storage
The Benefits
XYi Design likes GB Labs’ CoreOS, It’s powerful, flexible and easy to use and simplifies the management of all GB Labs’ products. As a result, performance is consistent, no matter how heavy the workload.
With both manufacturing and support located together in the UK, we rely on GB Labs to keep the studio working.
Our future capacity needs can be collaboratively planned and budgeted for, summarised Edgell.
