NetApp recently co-sponsored with Cisco a bunch of premiers for the most successful Star Trek movie ever. As you might expect from my previous blogs on this topic, NetApp technology was once again pivotal in bringing this movie to market. ILM is not a tired storage marketing cliché to NetApp – it’s actually a premier customer! :)
There’s an interesting link emerging between the computing and storage infrastructures of leading post-production / animation houses - and Cloud Providers.
Media Production as a Service? (MPaaS)
Most post-production / special effects / animation houses were early adopters of grid computing based on x86 processors powered by Linux. A small but widely deployed set of applications (capturing, authoring, rendering, lighting, editing, etc…) created a specific kind of virtualized workload, dynamically provisioned and load-balanced across thousands of server nodes – all connected to a shared storage system.
While the data management & protection technology behind such a configuration is fairly straightforward for an enterprise networked storage provider, unique challenges do arise. Extreme performance demands, continuous deadline-driven availability and minimal infrastructure costs are common characteristics of this market.
NetApp has developed a low-cost, high performance and high efficiency reference architecture for this market which bears a striking resemblance to the reference architecture we will publicly launch for Cloud Infrastructures.
I promise to leak more details soon, but if you’re a NetApp customer - rest assured unlike other competitors inventing endless “purpose-built” products at every whim – your investment and knowledge will be protected! In the meantime, if you’re curious I would study our offerings here, here, here & here for starters :)
Changing Film Making Forever
What’s even cooler about this NetApp architecture is that it’s being deployed by the team behind a movie expected to change the process of making and viewing films forever.
If you’re considering deploying or subscribing to NetApp-powered Cloud services (and about 2/3rds of the world internet users already are!), wouldn’t you like to have a life which will indeed imitate the state of the art?
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