At-A-Glance
Customer:
Boxel Studio operating in the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Latin America, with over 350 top-tier artists, producers, and engineers.
Industry:
Visual Effects (VFX) and Animation – with global teams delivering episodic and feature content for film and streaming.
Challenge:
Boxel’s hybrid on-prem model was reaching its limits as global demand and project complexity grew. They needed to scale GPU workstations quickly, manage burst rendering, and reduce hardware overhead – all while maintaining performance and security for a fully remote artist workforce.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Boxel Studio has operated fully remotely. Artists connect from across the globe to on-premise workstations and servers hosted at the studio’s facility, using tools like Splashtop and Parsec. The in-house IT team ensures stability and performance on-site, even as the core production team works from anywhere.
However, as project complexity and demand increased, this hybrid model began to show its limits. That’s when CenterGrid became more than a backup — it became the pathway forward.
“When demand surpasses our internal capacity, we rely on CenterGrid to scale seamlessly. And by mid-2026, our goal is to fully migrate our operations to CenterGrid.”
Partnering with CenterGrid has given Boxel Studio the ability to scale with confidence in a volatile industry. But beyond infrastructure, it’s the people who made the difference.
Golden images tailored to each department allow artists to get started quickly, with all the tools they need pre-configured and optimized.
High-speed centralized storage supports workflow-specific hot and cold strategies. Symlinks reduce duplication while maintaining naming consistency—vital for VFX production pipelines.
Boxel is implementing a dynamic cloud render strategy with burst capacity and VM configurations adapted to each project. Monitoring dashboards provide real-time visibility.
Upgraded networking — including static IPs and routing improvements — supports fast, stable data transfers. Artist feedback helps fine-tune profiles and balance performance under real-world workloads.
| Category | 2025 (Current) | 2026 (Target) |
|---|---|---|
| Artists on CenterGrid | Partial (as needed) | 100% cloud-based |
| On-prem Infrastructure | Primary for most users | Fully decommissioned |
| Cloud Storage | 1PB+ | +1PB/year growth |
| Workstations | 100+ hybrid | Fully virtualized |
| Render Nodes | Burstable | Scalable & cloud-native |
Too many teams treat cloud like a light switch and get burned by outages, downtime, and chaos. The Cloud Migration Blueprint helps you avoid costly missteps with real-world guidance, tactical checklists, and insider insights from CenterGrid’s private cloud experts.
