Jeeze

All that kit, and they still created something that didn't look or move much like a polar.

Don't even get me started on the armour.

One of the most destroyed books->film of all time.

http://www.bridgetothestars.net/fanart/bears/iorek1.jpg

The chap that drew this should have been in charge.

Down with the Authority!

@Worldwide perspective

You misunderstand the terminology of dark fibre.

Typically, owning (or leasing) dark fibre means that you own or lease the entire capacity of the fibre; you are responsible for "lighting it up" with your terminal equipment and you have complete use of and control over the entire bandwidth of the link. You get to decide what protocols are used and you can leave the links idle or max them out 24/7.

This, as opposed to renting bandwidth (guaranteed or not) on a virtual link on somebody else's network, where they provide the terminal equipment, etc and you may share the link with other customer's data and you may pay a variable rate according to your bandwidth utilisation profile.

Dell vs. HP

"They're the people who can react the quickest. We ordered 1,000 cores and they delivered it five days later. HP just can't react as quickly."

While I've never been a big fan of Dell, this observation is right on the money. When our company decided to replace our aging IBM & Dell laptops, (thousands of them to give you some scale) HP was initially chosen for the vendor, possibly because the board got free laptops from them or some other such 'political' motivation. HP repeatably failed to deliver on time, "lost" part of our order, shipped machines with no rhyme or reason, and their customer service sucked. You'd think they'd try a little harder with a million-dollar acct. Eventually we switched back to Dell in mid-stream. (the similar-specced Dells were cheaper too) Dell's customer service has come a long way. These days they're actually helpful, prompt, and will actually listen to your problem instead of reading from a script and/or raking you over the coals if you deviate from what they think you should do to troubleshoot an issue. Reliability-wise they've been pretty much on par with each other, though we did seem to get a bad batch of Seagate 80 GB drives, as we've had several failures in less than a year. The Dells seem a little more willing to work with our antiquated projectors in conference rooms as well and the screens are better IMHO, though I think the HP styling is sleeker. Personally I would have chosen Lenovo.

6,000 cores of blather

"eight object storage servers using HP processors which control the bulk storage"

What exactly is an HP processor?

This article reads like a hardware requisition written up by a CTO. What are they running on the HP's exactly? What was the Lustre rollout like? And how did they push 10Gbps over unlit fiber? John Lettice is rolling over in his hammock.

Of course...

...HP can't react quickly, what do you expect? First they have to order and assemble millions of boxes, then fill them with peanuts/bulgarian airbags/whatnot, then find lorries (in the thousands) to cart the boxes to the site, then reassemble the kit... It'll take years! Get real!

Mine's the XXX-large one with the extra pockets and hood and inner lining and...

Lotsa paid advertisements

being passed off as journalism here lately.

Which PR company wrote that for you?

So the movie is shit but hey they used a LOT OF TECHNOLOGY in it.

Slow day eh?

1000 servers

No one actually buys 1000 servers and expects them to ship out in five days. What he probably meant to say was "Dell came in and bought the business by cutting the price to next to nothing." Dell do that alot with these sorts of procurements because they have absolutely no clue how to put the solution together. None.

These customers do not understand what real value is. Rumour has it that storage was an absolute nightmare to set up and get running. If that's true it surely can't be for any other reason that the fact they bought crap storage to run a crap filesystem.

HP stirage

HP stirage server processors. Yup, figures, given the way their staff are treated. Lots of stirage at performance review time.

IMHO, an office of happy contented staff, most waiting for their acceptance of another vendors job offer, contemplating early retirement, or career change.

Another Dell fanboi article

How much did Dell pay for this "journalism"?

And good luck running RAID6 on 3DXor ..........

Re: AC - maybe they didn't have the skills to manage / configure the storage for the filesystem and vice versa. Certainly, the requirement for a huge number of boxes in a very small time smacks of a lack of any real IT management.

RE: David Wiernicki

I have to agree - whilst the technology in these projects are amazing, the stories are getting pretty mediocre. I was very unimpressed with "The Golden Compass", a very forgettable movie, and in no way comparable to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" or even the "Aladin" cartoon movie. In fact, the other week I enjoyed watching "Lilo and Stitch" with the kids (about the twentieth time) much more than "The Golden Compass", and the kids did too.

I watched a documentary on "Bladerunner" the other day and was surprised when they said none of the effects were computer animated but used models and stop-motion photography tricks. For some reason, I'd assumed the super-slick effects had to be in some way computer generated. Maybe Hollywood needs to concentrate more on stories than technology. Having said that, I am fascinated by the tech behind it all, and would be interested in knowing more about the solution. Did Dell, HP or Infortrends release any whitepapers on it as I can't find any on the web?

Who ordered the kick in the bollocks for HP?

can I be the one to put the boot firmly where it belongs? - not that they really care, it's the same old story "Rraahah rah rah we don't care" -......-" oh shit, where have all our customers gone?! only the film industry are ordering new boxes?"

All that computing and it'll still be a crap storyline

re: supercomputers for animation

"50 years ago it was 1 guy and a pencil"

Yeah, movies are computer generated nowadays because we ran out of guys with pencils. Only of course it wasn't "1 guy with a pencil" it was hundreds of guys with boards, pens and ink and paint and cels and a whole metric ton of cheap overseas exploitative labour to in-between all the hero animation. The past was so much simpler and makes such an insightful comment on contemporary life; if you massively simplify it, eh.

"Just what we need ... another cgi movie."

Does anyone *need* movies at all ? Does this article *need* another pointless comment ?

Yes, yes, all very interesting I'm sure

But how many mice were involved?

@Ah Contrast

(Pixar CG movie strategy: Screw the big name actors. In fact, screw the dialog entirely if necessary. Make a movie about something nobody could even conceive of, and make it *absolutely fucking fantastic*.)

...Err hangon a sec?! --> Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Sigorney Weaver, Owen Wilson, Paul Newman RIP, Tony Shaloub, Michael Keaton, Peter O'toole, John Goodman, Billy Crystal......... Not big names??????

Bring on Cars 2 - Why Pixar rule - cause they put 4 yrs or more of development into a movie and not just 2......like everyone else!

Another Dell vs. HP comment

Dell actually was the second fastest company out of three. After the engineers passed their choices to the manager the manager then decide to order with Dell even when Budweiser was able to deliver 1000 crates in under two days! Knowing that his engineers would start a huge party if he had order with Budweiser he decided to be smart and chose to order with Dell instead. HP came in on third place.

Actually, I do not care for either companies. However, I do find it funny what someone, who needs to order 1000 computers, names as the reason for his decision. It was not the price, it was not the hardware, it is his impatience! It is like another episode of "The IT Crowd".

Interesting Article

To create believable photo realistic CG and animation sequences the artists at these places work at 4k resolution (4096X1714pixels), each uncompressed frame weighing in at tens of megabytes. Cinematic productions run at 24fps so storage, IO and bandwidth requirements for a production environment where there are upwards of 300 animators working concurrently is nearly unparralled.

Isilon also do some neat large storage arrays that are used in movie production and beyond.

The most impressive piece of kit i saw at one of these places was a 4k projector - capable of lifting work in progress frame sequences from storage and displaying these in real time.

These days its still the norm to shoot on 35mm film and to then scan to digital frames - from a data manipulation perspective things get really interesting with the introduction of 4k digital film cameras...

The boffin cause thats what these folks are... :)

"50 years ago it was 1 guy and a pencil"

Nostalgia.

Instead of purple haze on the guitar today Hendrix would be doing ACID on his laptop...

Interesting...

That for all of the advances and leaps forward in technologies we read about on the Reg, when it comes down to it, it all comes down to who can deliver and service quickest, rather than who can talk up their hardware the most. Still, thats' gotta be one seriously pissed off HP salesman eh?

Proof then... if needed, that the more things change, the more they really do stay the same.

Personally, I've run into HP on more than one occasion - and from several different areas of their business; and not one of them has been a particularly positive experience.