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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."
That's a funny question because I used to work at ILM's (San rafael, much less shiny) lab, benchmarking raids, including the first version of the IBM shark. At that time we came to the conclussion that the IBM raid was reliable, and reasonably fast, but the price was so far out of line, that it wasn't a real contender.
The shark, and many of the high-end raids, are really designed around transaction oriented applications (databases). ILM's application are classic video codes, which work better on a classic raid5, than they do on the data-sprinkler style raids like the shark, eva, clariion, etc. Netapp makes pretty decent storage boxes, and they're highly configurable, so I'm sure they have them fine tuned to the apps' preffered i/o size.
Furthermore, the nas/san has more to do with the spinaker software than the raid of choice. Back when I worked there, ILM was testing cluster sollutions, but the renderfarm was a bunch of sgi origins. The storage was hung off of a couple of 8-way irix boxes, and pushed around with NFS. Since then they've upped their compute capacity by a factor of 30, there's no way they'd be able to do all that I/O with NFS to a couple of big servers. The san setup lets them distribute the NFS load to a large number of servers, all sharing access to the storage on a san. A lot of other cluster filesystems allow this too.
From the benchmarking I've done of these types of storage clusters, you don't get the same single stream performance as you do from a big-iron server setup, but the aggregate across a large number of nodes is pretty good. Managing the mess, and reliability can be problematic. I've never used spinaker, but I've used almost all the other products in this space, and they're all in the "pretty good" category. My current favorite is apple's xsan, because it is really inexpensive, and so is the hardware.