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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.'"
Well, his method of choosing one vendor's product line over another certainly is efficient. Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.
Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...Cartman roshamboed someone for it.
I'm pretty sure that their providers of DL Tape are probably saying "They took mah job!"
"Franzen said he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling that its technology would be good, and so far, he has not been disappointed."
Bad, bad Franzen. Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware... although this is a good example of brand awareness and marketing in action.
OTOH, it must be nice to have a job where you can make purchasing decisions based on a gut feeling, I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Sweeeeeeeet, but you get your bitch ass back in the kitchen and make me some pie!
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Dear Trey or Matt: Switch to vector graphics methods, not raster! Save many disks of whatever. Kthnksbi.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
Despite the terrible strain on the animator's wrists.
Seeing as though The Simpsons are still drawn by hand, I would imagine "storage needs" involves warehouse space in addition to digital storage.
so they dumped some DLT drives and a ciprico array for some LTO drives and some xserves?
wow.
this is news how??
Bet they sure could save tons of HD space if they just had one clip of Kenny's death.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Isn't South Park done in flash? I know a lot of Adult Swim is done in flash...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
So, why are you bothering to comment? You're just cluttering things up.
It's like those kids on "Ain't It Cool News" constantly bitching about how lame the articles are, how much of a sellout Harry Knowles is, and how everyone there should get out of their basements. Without the slightest sense of irony.
Why not just post on an article you do care about?
One word: Hellastorage
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
Just don't name your machine "kenny." It's not good to have it crash every episode - even if you can reboot it.
If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for choosing Apple hardware. But doesn't it feel like the right thing...right here in the gut? Because that's where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen...the gut.
Did you know that you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now, somebody's gonna say `I did look that up and its wrong'. Well, Mister, that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.
Now I know some of you may not trust your gut...yet. But with my help you will. The "truthiness" is, anyone can make IT decisions. I promise to feel IT decisions!
"It's Dot Com!"
What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?
GIMP tells me that's about 2mb.
I've got to try that "gut feeling" in a meeting with my clients sometime real soon.
Client: "So, why exactly should we install PKI infrastructure?"
Me: "I've got a gut feeling that you need it"
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
RESPECT MY AUTHORITAY!!!!
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.
it kills kenny faster and more efficiently.
Why is 15TB of storage news? (And they don't even the full 15TB yet!)
;-)
What about the 200TB of Xserve RAID storage for a single project at the University of Wisconsin, which has been up and running for over half a year?
And no, this isn't a project serving a whole campus or an entire university student body. This is one single research project operated by one entity. Oh well, I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park.
Only Apple servers will do the job when the South Park guys decide it's time to play "kick the server."
Uhmm... dude. You know that it's not Groenig that's stopping the show, right? Creators are usually not in full control of their creations. Also, your post is way funnier when read in Fry's voice in my head. You kind of sound like him.
I think it is rather interesting of you to mention apple hardware over other platforms, but the interesting part of the article is this statment following.
"J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says he chose Apple hardware based on a 'gut' feeling"
Gut feeling huh, that is an interesting way of making a tecnology choice!!!!!!
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
If this wasn't South Park, nobody would care.
Yes, hence why it's on Slashdot... us nerds like the show and like to hear stuff about it. It's called entertainment, but if you'd prefer boring, humorless technology reports 24/7 might I recommend this site.
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.
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?
You plug it in and it works.
It's sort of like the underpants gnomes, except there is no step 3.
WHO GIVES A FUCK?!
Quit making slashdot so god damn gimmicky.
which is kind of hard to do with a multi-terabyte NAS. For quick backups, nothing beats disk, but for archival storage, I'll stick with tape. Kind of hard to restore your environment when the building holding the NAS has been destroyed by some natural disaster.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
"The Simpsons are great..."
great is ok...but amazing would be great.
I do not accept czechs.
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
I know this is off-topic, but most of the discussion so far has been pretty uninteresting, so I was wondering how other slashdotters feel about the "Blood Mary" episode of South Park being pulled off the air and basically being censored from TV or any other future reproductions because it offended a few religious conservatives.
Here's another news article on it featured in the North Korea Times.
I'm sure we'll see everyone with ipods, using itunes on ibooks, a new Apple tree infront of the school and a crooked Macintosh logo bumper sticker on the school bus.
:)
Nothing like trade
So the Xserve RAID disk arrays flatter the linear tape setup with words of admiration? (I think they meant to say "complemented").
I'm not so sure. Apple's are supposed to be user-friendly, right?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
There, see? Sometimes it works.
It's news because South Park is pushing certain limits much farther than anyone else, and so it is useful to know what technology they use. Think back to shortly after The Simpsons became a hit, and then every other network tried to jump in with animated prime-time shows, and pretty much all failed. This is discussed on one of The Simpsons DVD commentaries, and Matt Groening and the others explain what these other shows did wrong. The big thing was trying to use too few people. These other shows would hire one or two big name writers, and expect them to write a whole season. On The Simpsons, on the other hand, they had a dozen writers, with most writers only working on one episode for a season. They had many directors, with each directory only responsible for an episode or two. So, it is not surprising that these other shows sucked...how can one or two writers and one or two directors produce year after year (or even one year) of quality on a weekly TV series?
But look at South Park. They do all the things that for those other shows were fatal mistakes. Most episodes are written by Trey Parker, or Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or by those two and Pam Brady. And besides writing, Parker and Stone direct. They write original music, and perform it. And they do a large number of the voices.
And on top of that, they do it on an insane schedule, sometimes not finishing a script until days before the episode must air.
Yet, it works. They produce a great show.
To do this requires very good technology. They aren't sending stuff off to Korea, to come back weeks or months later. They've got deadlines much tighter than any other animated series, and so they need technology that is very fast and very reliable, much more so than any other series needs.
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.
God damn it, tape drive! Thats a BAD tape drive! That's MY SAN! Mom!
From a Storage Admin's perspective, they've got a pretty old infrastructure and they are moving to a newer, faster more flexible setup... smart move.
They started out with DLT7000, which I don't think you can buy anymore, but those drives could only backup about 32MB/s with compression. Compare that with a modern day LTO-3 drive which can backup 80MB/s WITHOUT compression. Even if they just installed 3year old 1Gb/s FibreChannel HBAs, and upgraded the tape drives, they would have had a better set up. Hopefully they upgraded their backup servers otherwise they'll hit bottlenecks just trying to drive faster tape and disk.
Even though they went with a Xserve based upon a 'gut feeling', the Xserve, while not the greatest array out there (even in the midrange/low end segment), I've seen worse.
I think the bigger news in the article is that they kicked out Legato. For a small shop like this, Legato might be over kill.
Good to see they are upgrading with the times.
Phase 1: Upgrade storage hardware.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit!
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.
South Park, for whatever bashing it takes as infantile potty humor mixed in with occasional Left wing / Right wing issues, has set a new standard for cable TV shows. An average episode costs less than $100,000 USD (not counting whatever deals Creators Parker and Stone have with Comedy Central) and can go from concept to final print in two weeks. Throw in it's high ratings with the 18-35 crowd, and in one 30 second commercial spot, you the parent company have just recouped your initial investment.
Adult swim has taken this sort of guerilla approach, picking up cheap, quick turn around projects. There's no huge capital outlay (unless you're buying an old fox show that was a failure and will probably never see the light of day again.....) and even if it fails, you can drop something fresh into it's slot in no time.
I wonder if the business plan ripoff has contributed to the Viacom / AS fued? Or if viacom just can't remove their heads from thier asses...
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Yes, it takes a whole 30 gigs on my computer.
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."
... insert obligitory 1, 2, 3, Profit! statement here.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Though I am missing the last few seasons from my DVD collection, what I've heard from the commentary thus far is that they are the only remaining, currently airing, hand-painted cell animation series out there (or something to that extent). I would assume that any digital intervention in the production process would be scanning each cell into a digital format for easier and faster clean-up and editing.
A proud provider of services through the Microsoft Reboot Engineer Certification since 1997!
You're missing something: A warranty and support contract.
After all, I am strangely colored.
This is Slashdot, where people think Linux on a Xbox is a solution for something.
Many here will never understand why people buy stuff from actual companies, and things they just pull out of a box and turn on and go on with their life at that.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
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."
Here is an explanation of the "brown noise" that makes you crap your pants when you hear it.
Such subtle, arcane humor. I love it!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The animation company I work for, Animation Collective, uses a similar setup. We have Apple Xserve G5s and XRaids. It is ridiculous the amount of data that we deal with. The raids constantly fill up. We just upgraded to the 7 TB XRaid, which I hope holds out for a while.
We are coming close to releasing a new production called Kappa Mikey. It is Nickelodeon's first ever global program acquisition.
One of our animators just posted an entry on the company blog. Check it out www.kappamikey.com/blog