Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Makers of South Park turn to Apple for new storage setup



JANUARY 02, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - While South Park may appear technologically amateurish with its character cutouts, over the past nine seasons the cartoon series has added a great deal of storage-consuming detail, including backgrounds and crowd shots that can take up to 100MB of memory each. And that’s on top of a show that still produces all of its content in-house, where more than 30 artists work right up until deadline, making frequent changes to each episode of the weekly TV series.


To handle its growing storage needs, the makers of South Park this past season began moving away from a direct-attached disk backup and tape library that often took more than a day to back up data. Instead, the show’s producers are changing over to a faster tape library system and disk systems that later this month will blossom into a full storage-area network (SAN).

J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, said the show was simply running out of storage space on its digital linear tape (DLT) library and direct-attached disk storage from Plymouth, Minn.-based Ciprico Inc. So in May, a new linear tape open (LTO)-2 tape library from Exabyte Corp. in Boulder, Colo., and three Xserve RAID disk arrays from Apple Computer Inc. were installed.


posted by Agent 1138 @ 11:27 AM

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