Making a rat's tale

No one watching Remy , the charismatic rodent with an epicure's palate, skitter across the kitchen floor in Pixar's summer release "Ratatouille" will leave the theater pondering how Pixar managed to store all that data. But behind Remy's world of stylized French cheeses and plump grapes is Ibrix, a Billerica company that just won an award for its "data management solution."

Mundane though it sounds, new storage technology has become an important part of the tech sector as more people want to retrieve, share, and store digital files -- whether it is hundreds of users streaming the same Internet video, scientists analyzing a genome, or thousands of computers rendering an animated rat flipping a perfectly cooked omelet.

"The founders of the company really saw an explosion in data and content, and saw that it's only going to grow," said Ibrix chief executive Bernard Gilbert . "The amount of digital data we're generating as a society is incredible -- everyone's putting it on the Internet; that data has to live somewhere."

But traditional storage systems make sharing and accessing files more difficult. Older systems have the equivalent of a turnstile, meaning multiple users trying to access the same file must queue up.

"What we do for them is equivalent to putting a toll booth on every lane of the highway -- completely blowing it open and giving them very fast access to their data," said Sudhir Srinivasan , chief technology officer of Ibrix.

Pixar's old storage system slowed down production as the company began to create more visually complex movies, maturing from the relatively simple scenes of "Toy Story" in 1995 to ones where hundreds of squirming rats fall out of the ceiling at the same time or a shaft of light refracts through a wine glass.

"Any time you see visual complexity on the scene -- a pleasing scene very rich in detail -- that generally corresponds to using lots of computer power to make it look that way," said Greg Brandeau , senior vice president of technology at Pixar Animation Studios.

As the amount of computation that goes into Pixar movies has increased -- with Ratatouille using 420 times the computing resources of "Toy Story" -- an unexpected problem surfaced.

Multiple computers used to render a particular scene would sit idle as they waited for access to a particular character's file.

That meant a big holdup during the production of "Cars" as the company found that it was taking far too long to render individual frames -- which each make up about one-25th of a second of film. Data that computers were capable of processing within an hour would take 10 hours because the computers were waiting for access to files.

"Something was broken and what it turned out to be was the central file server at the time; it couldn't go fast enough," Brandeau said. "We solved the problem by putting in the Ibrix."

The applications of Ibrix technology go beyond complicated animation renderings. Last month, the company took the top award in the data management category at the MITX Technology awards, presented by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange.

Potential clients include Internet companies, biotech companies that must analyze reams of genomic data, and even financial firms that would like to quickly analyze volumes of information about the stock market.

"You've got a lot of content that's being either accessed or worked on at the same time, by a lot of different people at the same time -- so that data needs in a way to be in multiple places all of the time and doing that is almost impossible with traditional technologies," said Simon Robinson , of the industry analyst firm The 451 Group.

Ibrix serves a mix of companies. For example, AOL uses Ibrix technology to help store and organize vast amounts of data, Pixar uses Ibrix to create more detailed scenes, and a division of Amazon.com uses it to help enable its data mining.

Still, no one is sure how big the specialized data storage market will get, according to Robinson. The area could remain a specialized area , or could become more mainstream with businesses of all sizes using such products to manage an increasing amount of digital content.

"Quite a lot of companies are honing in on this market," Robinson said. "The volumes of data we're talking about and the file sizes we're talking about and the sheer numbers of files is pretty much unprecedented."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.