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ILM's Datacenter
kylegordon writes "CGW has inside scoop on Industrial Light and Magic's facilities after they moved from San Rafeal to San Franciscos Presidio. With 3000 disks, it can shift 170Tb to 5000 rendernodes over 10GbE and 1GbE network links. It's an impressive system, for impressive films."
I've tried bluearc. It works alright, though not as well as the whitepapers say. This is true of most everything, though. What really pissed me off about bluearc is the pre-sales engineers who seemed to have drunk a whole hell of a lot of the company coolaid. The whole story is that the filesystem is "implemented all in hardware", so it's really fast, and that should solve all your problems.
Well, I've been around the block enough times to know that no filesystem is actually implemented in hardware. They may have allocations done on the disk drives like Object-Disks, or they may have the transaction model built into the network protocol, but nobody is burning filesystem asics. If they are, I wouldn't buy one. Even local filesystems take decades to work out the bulk of the bugs. If you remember the EFS to XFS transition on irix, you know what I'm talking about.
The Bluearcs are fine, the people I had to deal with were just full of themselves. They seemed completely convinced they had come up with something that had never been done before, and that it was gonna knock my socks off. Except I'd been there, done that, and knew about how much it should cost. I've never installed a site with bluearc, but it's been a contender several times.