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How Epis Technology Makes a High-Performance, Low-Cost Platform for 3D Professionals: Building a 3D Render Farm with Synology

3D animation, visual effects, and high-resolution image processing have entered a new era. In this new era, GPU performance, scalable storage, and reliable throughput are just as important as artistic skill. As companies work to make their rendering cycles faster and their workloads more difficult, the need for a strong infrastructure is clear.

The National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan saw this need and set out to build the country’s only national-level 3D cloud render farm. After looking at all their options, they chose Synology storage because it had the best performance, was easy to understand, and was the best value. These same benefits are what Epis Technology uses to help studios, businesses, and research institutions build scalable render pipelines using Synology’s modern infrastructure.

GPUs alone are not enough for a modern render farm

High-end CPUs and powerful GPUs may run the rendering engine, but without the right storage platform, the production pipeline gets slow, stuck, and expensive. Rendering workloads need:

  • High throughput for reading and writing at the same time
  • A lot of storage that can grow for project files and virtual machines
  • Dependable performance when the GPU is working hard
  • Efficient backup and protection of data throughout the rendering process

Synology met these needs at NCHC, allowing their render farm to host more than 300 virtual machines, with more than 100 of them doing rendering tasks at the same time. Today, Epis Technology installs similar Synology-based systems for businesses that need fast, reliable performance without paying enterprise-level prices.

Cost-Effective Without Sacrificing Quality

Cost is one of the biggest problems for 3D artists, studios, and even national institutions. Other companies’ high-performance storage solutions often come with:

  • Lock-in with a vendor
  • Made-up limits
  • Fees for licensing and support that aren’t clear
  • Prices that aren’t clear and make the total cost of ownership go up

Synology doesn’t make any of these mistakes. NCHC found that the cost per terabyte was 5–6 times lower than that of first-tier storage providers. Synology cut costs and improved performance by letting users choose compatible HDDs and SSDs.

Epis Technology adds to this value by giving:

  • Planning infrastructure in a clear way
  • Costs of deployment that are easy to predict
  • Planning for long-term scalability
  • Professional Synology integration and improvement

This method makes sure that businesses can build world-class render farms without spending too much on storage infrastructure.

Performance That Grows With Creative Needs

NCHC engineers compared Synology RS3617xs+ systems with storage from other companies during testing. Synology always had 100 MB/s faster throughput, which shows that you don’t have to pay a lot for high performance.

Now they have deployed:

  • Synology FS3017 all-flash array as the VMware datastore, which speeds up VM cloning by 3 to 4 times with the NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI
  • RS3617xs+ cluster with extra units that can hold 230 TB of rendered output and point cloud data
  • DS3617xs as a place to back up files offsite

These architectural patterns are the main parts of our Synology-based infrastructure services for Epis Technology clients. We make custom storage clusters that keep high throughput for large file pipelines, GPU rendering, and simulation workloads.

Data protection built in for huge rendering jobs

A single rendering VM can hold hundreds of gigabytes of assets. It is both time-consuming and expensive to restore an entire machine just to get one file. Users of Synology’s Active Backup for Business can look through VM-level backups and get individual files right away, without having to do a full restoration.

NCHC also depends on:

  • Snapshot Replication for protecting multiple versions
  • Backups stored offsite to keep data safe in case of a power or network outage

Epis Technology uses the same data-protection tools in all of the Synology deployments we manage. Our team makes sure that rendering pipelines stay safe, strong, and up, even when there is a lot of activity or something goes wrong.

Giving 3D Professionals More Power with Better Infrastructure

NCHC moved Taiwan’s national render farm to Synology, which cut infrastructure costs by a lot while also making it more reliable and faster. This made it possible for them to offer cloud-based rendering services at much lower prices, which helped local creators and production studios grow their businesses without having to worry about money.

Epis Technology continues this mission by helping businesses, filmmakers, architects, engineers, and VFX studios set up render solutions that are affordable and work well.

  • Give performance that is fast and easy to predict
  • Scale as the GPU and compute power grow
  • Use enterprise-grade backup tools to keep huge datasets safe
  • Keep critical workloads running and reliable

We know a lot about Synology environments, so we can make sure that our clients get fully optimized infrastructures that boost both speed and creativity.

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