Data Center Gets Star Treatment

Computerworld - As it rushed to complete work on Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith last February, special effects company Industrial Light and Magic found itself split between two worlds. The new home of the San Rafael, Calif.-based studio was in the final phase of construction as part of the Letterman Digital Arts Center (LDAC), a 850,000-square-foot, four-building campus in San Francisco's Presidio National Park. Two of those buildings today serve as headquarters for George Lucas' Lucasfilm Ltd. as well as its ILM and LucasArts Entertainment Co. subsidiaries.

ILM had been given responsibility for moving IT operations for all three business units. But Chief Technology Officer Cliff Plumer was also in an enviable position. His group had a rare opportunity to create an IT infrastructure, including new data centers and the network, from the ground up.

That February, however, ILM didn't have the processing power in its overcrowded data center in San Rafael to finish rendering all of the movie frames on time, and it didn't have the space for more servers. Bringing down the 2,500-processor server farm to move it would have had a huge impact on operations, since it runs 24 hours a day, says Plumer.

Keeping Star Wars fans waiting was not an option, so ILM bought an additional 250 dual-processor blade servers, installed them in the new data center at the LDAC 20 miles away and connected them into the render server farm in San Rafael by way of a 10Gbit/sec. fiber-optic link.

Today ILM resides in a quiet setting with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. From the outside, the style of the buildings is more in keeping with the former Army base's heritage than what one would expect for a high-tech special effects and movie production company. There are no signs, and even at the main entrance, hidden behind plantings, the only indication of who occupies the buildings is a statue of Star Wars character Yoda atop a fountain.

Cliff Plumer, Chief Technology Officer at ILM Image Credit: John Harding

The main data center includes a 3,000-processor server farm, approximately 150TB of network-attached storage and a 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone that may be the largest built by any company to date. It has some 340 10Gbit ports and supports traffic loads of 130TB per day. Power and cooling systems sit in two adjacent rooms, which Plumer says helps to keep maintenance traffic out of the data center.