From Emergency Rescue to Infrastructure Backbone: QQ studio Storage Upgrade

QQ studio, a Czech production and postproduction company, faced critical challenges with their visual effects pipeline in mid-2024. Over 40 terabytes of active project data were stored on an aging QNAP NAS, causing data bottlenecks and hardware crashes that jeopardized client deadlines and creative flow. The studio's hybrid setup, where editors and VFX artists worked directly on local workstations, made reliance on remote cloud storage impractical due to the large, uncompressed video files.

To address these issues, the studio sought a solution that combined massive data throughput with enterprise-grade reliability. The team implemented an industry standard architecture using TrueNAS, a file system known for its robustness and efficiency. This was run on a Dell PowerEdge server with dual 32-Core Intel Xeon processors and 192GB of RAM, powered by Proxmox VE.

TrueNAS's ZFS file system allowed for maximizing storage capacity while tolerating the failure of any two hard drives without data loss. The legacy QNAP NAS was upgraded and repurposed as a secondary backup server located in a separate physical location for geographical redundancy. This dual-server setup provided a resilient foundation for the studio's operations.

The storage was then customized for different departments. The TV Production dataset was optimized for high throughput and streaming performance, while the VFX dataset was tuned for rapid small-file access and high IOPS. This custom tuning enabled the studio to assemble, render, and deliver complex visual work without performance stutter.

The team also automated the fragile manual backup process, establishing a 1:1 offsite replica over a secure VPN tunnel to a secondary facility 50 km away. While not suitable for raw video files, encrypted offsite snapshots of server configurations and project tracking databases were maintained for safety and recovery. Project tracking was shifted to a locally hosted solution, avoiding high SaaS subscription fees and ensuring instant preview uploads and lag-free tracking.

The new storage infrastructure powered 64 active users, achieving a full Return on Investment in just three months. Initially a targeted solution for the VFX team, the upgraded storage infrastructure became the central backbone of the studio's operations.