Animationsinstitut deploys Hammerspace

The Animationsinstitut is part of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg (FABW) in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and has established itself as one of the leading international film schools. Hammerspace will be showcasing its work with Animationsinsitut and other leading media and entertainment organizations at FMX 2025 in booth #3.2 in Stuttgart, Germany.

FABW manages between 200 and 250 projects per year, many of which are produced either at or in collaboration with the Animationsinstitut, that include requirements for high-performance data ingest and processing, as well as supporting multiple students collaborating on a single project. Additionally, the institute was looking for a solution that could take its render workloads out of its on-premises server room into the cloud.

A unique benefit of the Hammerspace platform relates to custom metadata. Animationsinstitut plans to use custom metadata to automate portions of its workflow. “It was very easy to understand that separating metadata from data will be the future,” said Stefan Binggeser, Head of Technology at the Animationsinstitut, when referring to the Hammerspace architecture.

“We have some workloads that really need performance, and some that require long-term, low-cost storage, so the ability to use metadata-driven data orchestration policies to automate tiering and protection throughout our environment was a key benefit of Hammerspace.”

Another critical aspect of the Hammerspace solution for Animationsinstitut was the ability to “assimilate” data from the school’s existing scale-out NAS system and make that part of the Hammerspace data environment. This allowed Animationsinstitut to keep its scale-out NAS system in place, import that metadata into the Hammerspace metadata layer, and then reuse and repurpose that system for additional storage capacity.