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Hello. Welcome to this edition of NetApp Today. I’m Alex Plant, your host, and I’m sitting
here with Paul Gunn, who’s a Systems Administrator for New Zealand based Weta Digital. Thanks
for stopping by our studio today. So talk to me about Weta. What is Weta and what projects
have you guys worked on?
Paul Gunn: Weta Digital’s an award-winning visual effects house based in Wellington,
New Zealand. Started in 1993 and some of the movies you might recognize that we’ve worked
on is “Lord of the Rings Trilogy”, “King Kong” and most recently “Avatar”.
Alex Plant: That’s exciting. And what’s your role at Weta? How long have you been
there?
Paul Gunn: I’ve been there almost ten years. I’m a systems administrator in the Systems
team. I focus on the network, storage and the general sort of health of the data center.
Alex Plant: So you’re responsible for providing the infrastructure for a lot of these big
projects.
Yeah. I’m very, very much near the bottom of the pile.
[Laughter]
All the beautiful stuff happens well above me.
So but you really, what you really are close to is the technology evolution and so talk
to us about, you know, what that’s looked like and kind of the, how it’s changed over,
over the years.
The technology’s always driven by the demands of the production, so we make our technology
larger, we add extra features, we grow it as the movies get more and more complex. “Lord
of the Rings” we had 3,000 cores on our render wall, “Avatar” it was more like
34,000 cores.
34,000?
Yeah, so quite a bit of a growth over seven years -- But we always reflect the complexity
of the movies. “Lord of the Rings” had a lot of live action, “Kong” had more
virtual environments, “Avatar”, 3D, so there’s just extra challenges each movie
and so we just have to reflect that, get bigger, faster so we can cope with what’s required,
what the director wants to see.
Alex Plant: And how, how have you addressed those from a, you know, technology standpoint,
how have you gotten in front of some of these challenges and how has it been working, how
has it been to work with NetApp?
Paul Gunn: As our render walls grown, we’ve had to grow the storage at the back end as
well to keep up with it, to keep the renders going, 'cause near the end of a production
we’re running very, very busy, 24/7 for the last few weeks, last few months of production.
I can only imagine [Chuckles]
So we’ve had to have a technology that we can scale out and then we’ve had to have
– we have to use tools to find out where the hot spots are and make sure we can mitigate
that and make sure the data’s getting to the render wall on time so we’re still getting
everything rendered.
And I know that you use NetApp and talk to us about the role that NetApp’s played,
you know, in solving the challenges.
NetApp arrived pretty much just after I did so it’s been there nine years and we’ve
just scaled it up, added more as we needed. The big thing for us is it’s just, it was
the right choice for a higher availability site. We use some of the features a lot to
make sure – like snapshotting – to make sure we’ve always got copies of what we
need to work on; we don’t lose any of the work. ‘Cause the work that the artists do
is the most valuable thing. They can’t lose that.
Well talk to us about where this is going. What’s next in terms of the technology and
the role that it’s played in the moviemaking?
I just see we’ll be, keep reflecting the growth of the productions. We’ll be, as
the productions get more and more complex, more and more CG, more complex stuff, 3D,
we’re just going to have to keep scaling that render wall up, keep scaling the storage
up to keep pace with it.
We’re seeing more 3D these days.
I think we’re going to see a lot more 3D and that’s just extra storage and extra
rendering 'cause you’ve got to do both eyes.
That’s great. Well thank you so much for stopping by our studio. It’s a great story
and you’ve done some great work. Yeah, we appreciate it.
Thanks very much.
Great. Thanks, Paul. And Thank you for stopping by. I’m Alex Plant and this edition of NetApp
Today and we’ll see you next time.
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