Walt Disney Studios purchased fellow animation powerhouse Pixar
Animation Studios almost a year ago in a blockbuster $7 billion
deal. With the deal came some turnover in creative executives and
sparked new ideas about the direction of Disney's next animated
feature,
Meet the Robinsons due out in March -- changes that
Disney feature animation vice president of technology Jack Brooks
said were "not trivial."
"It required us to install an entirely new system in three to
four weeks to accommodate all the changes we were making," Brooks
explained. Disney is heavily reliant on 25 million "texture" files
-- small but high-resolution images that are grafted onto 3-D
models to create colors and textures, like skin, hair or fur on
characters.
A major character usually appears in at least 50% to 75% of the
shots and Disney was continually hitting about 1 million of those
25 million texture files. This was creating "hot spots" in the
firm's Panasas Inc. cluster that Brooks said was becoming outdated.
Add to the process the revisions from the new creative executives,
and it would far exceed the capabilities of the older
network attached storage (NAS) cluster.
Disney, Brooks said, figured out it needed to do two things:
replace the Panasas cluster and its included storage with a system
three times as big, with three times as much throughput, within a
month, tops.
"It was a complete panic," Brooks said. Because of that, the
company reached out to Ibrix, already battle-tested by its
subsidiary.
Pixar has been using the
Ibrix SAN filesystem since the production of
its latest feature, Cars. Brooks said the recommendation
from Pixar was what spurred Disney to work with Ibrix, but that
the system Disney put together was newer, bigger and faster.
"They bought their's a year to two years ago," Brooks said,
adding that the moviemaking processes of the two studios remain
largely separate. "Ours has much more cache on the Dell Inc.
NFS heads -- 32 GB each, much more memory
and more capacity." Disney also has a bigger "render farm" of
2,000 server nodes that puts all the digital information into
each animation frame.
NetApp OnTap GX wasn't a consideration
Behind the
Dell servers and the Ibrix file system is the usual
suspect: EMC Corp. Disney has two EMC CX3-80
storage area networks (SAN) running at the
back end of this system. The studio also added two new Network
Appliance Inc. (NetApp) filers for Tier-2 and Tier-3, using a
FAS 6070 Fibre Channel-based system and a FAS 6030 with 500 GB
SATA disks respectively.
Asked whether NetApp's OnTap GX clustering system had been a
possibility, Brooks responded, "No -- at the time, it really wasn't
ready to go." (GX had
just started shipping last June; Brooks said
the purchase process for the Ibrix system took place around July
and August last year.) Otherwise, according to Brooks, Disney is
a large NetApp shop in general, and he said he will be
evaluating OnTap GX again at a later date.
"For right now, though, we're completely happy with the
EMC/Ibrix system," he said. Disney did not evaluate newer Panasas
products due to time constraints.
The studio is "in transition" between finishing Meet the
Robinsons and starting its next animated feature. The next step
after completing Meet the Robinsons footage will be to
"park" the files on the Tier-3 NetApp filer for awhile before
sending them off to archival media, which Brooks declined to
describe in detail.
"There isn't a lot of migration with our tiered storage system,"
he said. "It's designed so that we put the correct data in the
correct place only once or twice during the whole process and then
just leave it there. It's more about freeing up performance on the
most heavily used files than anything else."