300 10Gbps network ports, 1Gpbs to each desktop, and over 300TB of disk storage… Whoa…
CNet has done a short piece on the Lucasfilm datacenter. I found two things very interesting about this operation. First, they have a very short time horizon on technology with some of it consider ‘legacy’ within 6 – 7 months. The second is that they put a high value on performance per watt of electricty.
As our machines become more powerful it takes more power to operate them. That power turns to heat which then takes even more power to remove lest the machine pull a China Syndrome. AMD has long been a leader in creating power-efficient CPUs but Intel has recently gotten some religion about it and now isn’t far behind.
I’m a big fan of AMD (as is LucasFilms it turns out with 198 dual-core, dual-processor Opteron machines) for this reason as well as they are generally cheaper per CPU cycle than Intel.