Storage Solutions • March 2013 • 11
STORAGE SOLUTIONS
what they're doing," he explains. "Sometimes, as people are
working, they can see sounds magically appear online."
Caccavo says that when reasons of capacity required Sky-
walker Sound to create more edit stations, the Mac-based
house opted not to throw more money at old-technology
Mac Pro workstations. "We didn't want to invest in more
Mac Pros right now when we expect them to be refreshed
in a few years. As we had need for mo-
bile rigs we decided to build more with
MacBook Pro Retinas — although we're
not using them in a mobile way. And we
needed ThunderLink to work with them."
Since Skywalker Sound already uses
Atto HBAs, they initially tried a Sonnet
Thunderbolt expansion chassis/Atto
HBA configuration but ran into issues
with the CommandSoft FibreJet SAN
management software.
"So Commandsoft helped us make
the software work just fine with Thun-
derLink. Atto also did a firmware update
for us. We found ThunderLink's cooling
fan a little too loud, so they gave it a
tweak, and that's now rolling into pro-
duction for everyone."
Caccavo isn't surprised that Atto had the solution Sky-
walker Sound needed when it set out to boost its edit sta-
tion capacity. "Atto is the approved vendor of Fibre cards
for Avid. I had a history with them when I was at Avid, and
Skywalker's had a history with them, too. So they were a
known quantity to us."
Although ThunderLink has only been in place for about
two months, it's already being used on feature film projects
in-house at Skywalker Sound, he reports.
Skywalker Sound's technical building.
Storage Supplement 2013RAV10FINAL READ.indd 11 2/28/13 4:57 PM
