What the professionals use…
17th February 2008
We may well worry about how to backup our favourite songs and family photos, but professional online storage is another world. To take an extreme case, imagine the needs of someone like movie company DreamWorks Animation, who use a parallel file server software from Ibrix to speed up the massive access requirements of their artists working on films like Kung Fu Panda, currently in production. The system has to cope with 75,000 – 100,000 batch-processing jobs per night, as artists work on animation frames for anywhere between a few minutes and around 15 hours, depending on the complexity of the sequence. DreamWorks’ Chief Technology Officer Ed Leonard explained;
“We needed super performance file storage and access so when 2,000 computers start asking for the same texture file for one of the characters, our system isn’t overweighed by I/O.” Scenes that once took two hours to create are now completed in seconds and, says Leonard, “…that’s pretty remarkable, and we’re scratching the surface on where we are going with this.”