From Marvel to Macy’s: Storage That Never Slows
How Pixel Farm Built Infrastructure That Keeps Up With Creativity
Tony Scherber, Systems Administrator
At Pixel Farm, deadlines are real and the files are heavy.
The team works across high-resolution video, animation, color correction, and design. Multiple editors and artists pull from the same storage at the same time. In that environment, storage isn’t a background utility or a place to dump footage – it directly affects how fast projects move and how confidently the team can work.
Before TrueNAS, the workflow was functional – but fragile. Large media files moved constantly across the network. Editors were working concurrently, competing with render jobs for precious bandwidth. The system could technically handle the data, but it didn’t always handle the pressure. When several artists hit it at once, performance dipped – and the whole studio felt the impact.
As Tony Scherber puts it, “When you’re in production, you can’t have people waiting on files.”
Waiting slows momentum. And in creative work, momentum matters.
A System Built for Real Workloads
Pixel Farm moved to a TrueNAS M-series system paired with high-bandwidth Ethernet, upgrading their backbone from Fibre Channel to 25 gigabit networking, and providing bonded 100 Gigabit connectivity to their TrueNAS unit. The goal wasn’t theoretical performance numbers or chasing benchmark results; it was consistent delivery under their demanding, real-world load.
The difference showed up quickly.
Editors could pull large 6K and 8K files without hesitation. Animators rendering through Maya and Redshift weren’t competing with file transfers. Designers and colorists working in Photoshop, Illustrator, Resolve, and Flame could collaborate without second-guessing the infrastructure.
“We just needed something that could keep up,” Tony explains.
That’s exactly what they got. Not peaks that looked good on benchmarks, but steady throughput when the entire team was active.
Scaling Up without Ripping and Replacing
As projects grew, so did storage needs. Pixel Farm expanded from their already substantial footprint to an even larger system, with hundreds of terabytes available for active production and archive workflows.
What mattered wasn’t just adding capacity. It was how that growth happened.
There was no need to re-architect the workflow or migrate to a proprietary media SAN ecosystem. Capacity expanded live, without interrupting active productions. Performance scaled without locking the team into vendor-specific hardware or mandatory refresh cycles.
Pixel Farm could decide when to grow and how to grow.
That flexibility matters in media environments, where infrastructure upgrades can’t derail client timelines. Storage has to fit around the work, not the other way around.
Control That Stays Out of the Way
Today, Pixel Farm runs high-resolution workflows without worrying about whether storage can keep up. Multiple editors collaborate. Large files move quickly. Backup systems replicate cleanly between TrueNAS platforms, creating a production and secondary environment that “just talks to each other nicely,” as Tony describes it.
TrueNAS underpins the entire stack, but it doesn’t dominate it. It doesn’t force a proprietary roadmap. It doesn’t dictate how the team scales next year. When it’s time to expand, Pixel Farm chooses the path forward.
That autonomy shows up in the work.
When storage isn’t part of the conversation anymore, you know you’ve done it right.
For Pixel Farm, that’s the real outcome. The infrastructure is powerful enough to disappear, flexible enough to grow, and predictable enough that the team can focus on what they’re actually hired to do: create.