Dedicated Server Hosting Blog

Or...Just an excuse to talk about the movie?  You Decide.

AVATAR is like crack- it boasts a 99% addiction rate upon the first usage. It's also a techie's dream.  It's techie crack.  So it will come as no surprise that SolutionPro employees have been talking about this movie.  In fact just about every aspect of the movie has been discussed in our office.  And to finally beat this dead horse one more time- some interesting information exists about the movie as it relates to data center design.  What demands are put on a data center to produce a movie with so much sensory sublimity?

Here are some quick facts gleaned from various blogs and online sources:

Challenges

Aside from the obvious ones we could pick out- there was one unconventional solution to a common challenge.  Anytime you pack this much throughput and processing into such a small area you’re going to generate heat.  The gear was stacked closely in order to achieve the required 10-Gigabit transfer rate.  The result was that an industry standard cooling solution- such as what you might find at the SolutionPro data center and many others- wasn’t going to work.  Instead, they used water-cooled racks.  Basically a radiator which sucks in the hot air, cools it through heat-air exchange, and then recycles it back through the front of the machine in the form of cooler air.

The result was quite interesting

WETA Digital claims that because the cooling was occurring within such a compact space-within the racks- that overall room temperature stayed relatively cool.  This meant that air conditioning of the main room’s air was minimal as well.  What’s more interesting about this model is that it is a passive heat exchange model for most of the year- they simply circulate the water through the radiator with pumps and the heat loss is enough to keep all the equipment cool.  For a couple months out of the year, the local climate is too hot for the passive model to work and they do need to turn on water chillers.  Additional savings are achieved by allowing the equipment to run at warmer temperatures than what may be industry standard.  Some estimates come in at tens of thousands of dollars saved by changing the temperature by one degree.

Some Parallels at SolutionPro

We will not even try to put ourselves in the same realm as the WETA Digital group.  Their data center is purpose-driven- it’s built for one task only.  The SolutionPro data center is built for many different types of clients.  However, there are some important lessons to be learned here.  Interestingly enough some of these principals have been at work at SolutionPro for some time.

Cooling

SolutionPro uses the typical air conditioning model that most data centers use and we don’t plan on changing that.  However, 10 years ago when the SolutionPro data center was built, it was thought that the raised-floor environment needed to be kept at 72 Degrees.  After quite a bit of re-engineering of airflows, standardization of server cabinets, and re-designing hot/cold rows, SolutionPro realized that 78 Deg. F was fine.  They key to accepting higher temperatures was maintaining airflow to the servers and maintaining temperature consistency throughout the equipment to eliminate hot spots.

If WETA Digital is claiming tens of thousands of dollars saved by changing the temperature 1 degree- that makes us wonder what SolutionPro is achieving by the 6 degree difference.  In fairness- 72 degrees really isn’t the industry standard anymore so it could be argued that it’s not really a 6 degree difference but it illustrates a point.

Final AVATAR Data-

So, it should be no surprise that most of the data and throughput was needed to produce this bandwidth-and-storage-hog of a movie.  The finished movie was quite a bit smaller.

What are the end results?

12 megabytes per frame-

288 megabytes per second at the 24 FPS standard

17.28 gigabytes per minute.  166 minutes was the length of the movie and--- do the math- that’s still a big file.