Studios switch from Sun Unix Servers to Linux Intel/AMD

Pixar Animation Studios has changed out Sun Microsystems Unix servers in its 'render farm' with eight new blade servers with Intel processors from Rackspace. The blade system servers contain a total of 1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors, and run on the Linux operating system.

Pixar's render servers fuse the graphic artists' images into finished film frames, and helped with the incredible graphics in the animated films, Monsters Inc. and Toy Story. There appears to be a growing trend in the film industry where Sun's Unix platform computers with RISC processors are being replaced by systems with either Intel or AMD processors that run on the Linux platform. In addition to Pixar, DreamWorks, Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Pictures' Imageworks have swapped out their Sun RISC systems for Intel or AMD servers on the Linux platforms. Needless to say, Intel is delighted. "We've got coverage now with the brand marquee companies," said Tom Gibbs, Intel's Director of Industry Marketing. "This is a complete migration. They are moving off Sun Solaris and onto Intel-based servers running Linux."

The conversion from Unix-RISC servers to Intel and Intel-compatible processors on Linux systems is a big shake-up in the server industry. The next arena where the Intel-Linux and Unix-RISC competition will be fierce is in the back-end systems market. Currently, for final scene approval, the studios' back-end systems are Unix-RISC computers that rely on heavy processing power to handle the workload. Because these computing systems are not designed to be portable, the studios must fly decision makers around the country for first-person scene approval. Intel is working on collaborative systems so that scenes will be viewable on standard laptops from any location.