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South Park Turns to Xserve for Storage Upgrade
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld reports that South Park producers are turning away from digital linear tape and direct-attached disk storage to a linear tape open setup complimented by Xserve RAID disk arrays. The show's creators never thought South Park would last nine seasons, so a storage hardware upgrade was necessary. J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling. From the article: 'While South Park may appear technologically amateurish with its character cutouts, over the past nine seasons the cartoon series has added a great deal of storage-consuming detail, including backgrounds and crowd shots that can take up to 100MB of memory each.'"
No. It's Maya.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Their old system was a DLT7000 tape drive. I used one of these for backup around five years ago. They hold 35GB uncompressed per tape and have a trasfer speed of 5 MB/sec. Think about trying to backup a 350 GB drive on one of these things. DLT7000 was replaced by LTO-1 and SDLT about four plus years ago. These systems get 100 GB on a tape. I guess they skipped that generation and went to LTO-2, 200 GB on a tape.
Last time I was buying this stuff, a 24 tape auto-loader was around $15,000 and the tapes were $50 each. That's only about 6 terrabytes before you have to manually change tapes. If you look at how much it costs to build a multi-terrabyte NAS server with 250GB+ SATA drives (way less), and how much faster and easier to deal with it is, you have to wonder what the point of tape is nowdays.
Of course the South Park people's data isn't very big at all. They've only got two terra-bytes to deal with! That's nothing by today's standards. I built a system five times that size two years ago. For less than they paid for the Apple Xservers today too.
True the image itself is only 2mb, but they render the show in Maya. So Scripts+models+textures+scenes=100mb.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/behind/interviews. php?tab=20#3
Interesting stuff - has some background technical info on how an episode is put together and what systems they use to do it all.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
For those of us who are ignorant and don't see why someone would use Apple hardware over good commodity stuff, what's the advantage in going with Xserve stuff?
Well, the Xserve stuff is cheaper.
Or, did you mean "commodity" as in "I got my 13 year old cousin to build something from parts he bought online?" Yeah, people who put any value on their data and time don't simply don't do that.
The Simpsons is now an all digital production, according to the DVD commentary. It may involve "hand drawing", but that either means hand drawing immediately scanned into a computer (for cleanup and coloring), or drawing on a tablet, etc. that goes directly into a computer. I don't know what software is used, but I haven't searched either.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
"Poor performance, but awsome tech support and familiar interface."
While the performance of MacOS X as a MySQL server was well-documented by Anandtech to be sub-par, I haven't seen any benchmarks showing any performance problems with the xRAID/xServe combination as a file server. And last I checked, it was extremely competitive on a dollar-per-GB basis for the claimed performance and reliability levels. If they just need something to store lots of files online, and have it be easy to administer, it doesn't seem like a bad deal.
E pluribus unum
http://www.spscriptorium.com/SPinfo/MakingOfSouthP ark.htm
After all, I am strangely colored.
The characters are still drawn and animated in pencil.
Film Roman here in LA does design/boards/layout, while several studios in Korea do the actual animation as well as the digital ink/paint.
He is also probably talking about assets pre rendering. Every character has textures associated with it, and the geometry, while not that huge, adds up.
What should be said is that it is NOT PowerPC hardware, there are NO G5's in them, and they don't run OSX. They're a sleek chassis full of RAID hardware, fiber channel connectivity, and 7 independant SATA controllers each with 2 hot swappable drives. Price/GB compared to rival products is extremely competitive, as in worlds cheaper. With 2x 512MB caches and dual fibrechannel connectivity, performance is pretty amazing with a full compliment of drives. The RAID servers are certified to work with Novell, Oracle, Windows Server, MacOSX, RedHat, YellowDog, Emulex, Cisco, ATTO, ADIC, etc. etc. etc. They still need some method of administering it (its just the storage), which may be an XServe, or virtually any other modern computer.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
It would surprise me if they didn't, given the Windows, Red Hat, Novell and Terra Soft certifications they boast about on their website.
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If your data is worth anything at all, and you are not in the commercially unusual position of being able to do your own system and support it etc (I'm ruling out google here, right) yourself, then it is very unlikely that the spotty-teen approach is better than the storage-system-vendor one, despite the latter having a higher up-front cost and being less fashionable on slashdot. Whether Apple are such a vendor I don't know: I guess they'd like to be.
Actually that was Futurama, as seen in 2ACV16 - Anthology of Interest I's opening sequence. "Painstakenly Drawn Before a Live Audience."
Does Apple still support this when you're not running Mac OS X?
Yes, they do. Support, though the project hasn't needed it, is one of the main reasons we got it.
With AppleCare Premium, 24x7 telephone and email support is included, as well as 24x7 4-hour on-site hardware service. Apple supports it as fibre channel storage, and they don't care what it's attached to. See also Apple's non-Mac OS X certifications for Xserve RAID. No, it doesn't include Fedora Core, but they still support the product itself.