Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1013519
www.postmagazine.com 29 POST AUGUST 2018 Give Yourself an Edge with ATTO Hardware that Works the Way You Expect 1988 - 2018 SEPTEMBER 14-18, RAI, AMSTERDAM IBC 2018 | Booth# 7.A26 VISIT US AT Host Bus Adapters | RAID Adapters | Bridges | Network Adapters that support Fibre Channel | SAS/SATA | Ethernet | iSCSI | NVMe and Thunderbolt™ to be nimble, and the stuff really has to be there. We keep it around for a while and we burn it when it's done because we know that the drive still contains the media. It's really a temporary thing, but it's essential. We started putting our money and time into that about a year ago, be- cause it was critical." Hall says the studio relies on "physical storage in a cold room, just like always. We don't use cloud storage because it's too expensive. We priced it out, the sheer volume of media we have and the amount of money it would cost to store is prohibitive. Buying stuff and plugging it in is cheaper." For its main server, Timber is using a hybrid-ca- pacity Qumulo QC24, featuring 24TB of raw HDD capacity and 1.6TB of raw SSD capacity. According to Wilfred Archila, the studio's systems expert, "We have four nodes, with some round robbing happen- ing in the background, so we have full coverage. Right now, we have it set up that if we lose one node, out of the four, we still are live, we're still working. If all four nodes are up, and we lose two drives, we're still working. Qumulo was very com- petitive, compared to other enterprise sources out there and the system is very robust." "It's state of the art, really," adds Hall. "We talked to a lot of different vendors and the Qumulo is bet- ter, more dependable, does more and costs less." CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES The California Academy of Sciences is one of the largest museums of natural history in the world. It was founded in 1853 as a learning center, and car- ries out original research and finds out innovative, technological ways to exhibit and educate. At the center of the facility is the Morrison Planetarium, which features the world's largest, completely digital planetarium dome. Inside, six 4K projec- tors are complimented by a 13.1 surround sound system, offering viewers a fully immersive, 180 degree experience (see photo on page 30). "Our visualization studio produces content for the entire museum, but the most challenging is for our planetarium," says Michael Garza, senior planetarium & production engineering manager, California Academy of Sciences. "We created an immersive experience that takes six 4K projec- tors, stitches and blends them across the entire 180-degree screen." The Cal Academy is primarily a UNIX centric house — every artist has two work stations — both LINUX and Mac. They use Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Clarise and other software tools commonly found California Academy's CG assets for its immersive display.