STORAGE

What keeps Superman's Fortress of Solitude safe? A new digital archive storage system from Sun Microsystems, the creator of the Solaris Operating System, is helping computer generated imagery (CGI) leader Rhythm & Hues protect Superman's secret lair and the studio's 20 years worth of groundbreaking CGI work. Sun's solution has helped Rhythm & Hues achieve dramatic five-fold performance gains, improve ease of archive management, and reduce its hardware footprint, and prepare for continuing data growth. "Rhythm & Hues has been at the forefront of CGI for entertainment and advertising for almost 20 years and our archives are both a unique record and a valuable resource. With our legacy archive storage system approaching the end of its usable life, we sought out the best of today's digital archiving solutions," said Mark Brown, vice president of technology at Rhythm & Hues Studios. "After a comprehensive evaluation, Sun emerged as the only vendor able to take a fully integrated approach and provide us with the high-performance, end-to-end solution we need now and as our archives grow." Sun worked closely with Rhythm & Hues to build an efficient and cost-effective high-performing digital archive system capable of holding all its precious archives, including its early work on such films as "Babe" and "Titanic" and recent projects such as the creation of the Fortress of Solitude for "Superman Returns" and the animation for "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties". "Many of the leading production companies are now joining large organizations from other industries in wanting to buy sophisticated digital storage solutions from technology vendors with a more integrated, systems-based approach," said Darrell Jordan-Smith, vice president of communications at Sun Microsystems. "Sun delivers a complete portfolio from Solaris, to server and tape archive. We have a depth of experience that is unbeatable in the market today." Taking advantage of one of the industry's leading storage tiering and archiving features, the Sun solution created for Rhythm & Hues includes the StorageTek Storage Archive Manager and Sun StorageTek QFS (SAM-QFS) software which was directly mapped to Rhythm & Hues's workflow. In contrast to many storage management software products that require workflows to be modified, the performance and flexibility of StorageTek SAM-QFS enable it to adapt to customer-defined workflows. In addition, Sun boosted the performance of the Rhythm & Hues storage system with the open source, freely available Solaris OS running on Sun Fire servers, and storage components including a Sun StorageTek SL500 tape library with LT03 tape drives. The migration from the old, less efficient ADIC-based HSM, to the new Sun end-to-end solution proved very smooth.