Sun in the Ice Age

Blue Sky Studios, a wholly-owned unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, deployed Sun Blade servers and Sun Ultra workstations for the rendering of its new animated feature Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

The Sun Blade X6250 server modules gave Blue Sky four times better performance than their previous solution, claimed Sun Microsystems.

Blue Sky deployed a Sun Constellation System consisting of 10 Sun Blade 6048 chassis with a total of 480 Sun Blade X6250 server modules, each powered by two Intel Xeon processor 5400 series; 120 Sun Ultra 24 workstations powered by the Intel Core 2 processor; and Sun's Enterprise Installation Services.

After full implementation, performance was four times faster than the previous solution, allowing the company to render digital frames faster and create more frames in less time. The new solution also enabled Blue Sky to improve technology support and increase design team productivity, giving the studio's designers powerful new design tools to create images for films in significantly less time.

"Sun has a strong reputation for engineering, and it shows when you work with these products," said Carl Ludwig, chief technical officer, Blue Sky Studios. "Technology like this, priced as well as it is, brings a lot of value to our company and what we do."

Blue Sky needed to expand its computing capacity for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs to accommodate a tight production schedule and render more digital content in a shorter time frame. The company also wanted to produce an in-house stereo three-dimensional version of the film, which required higher-performance processing.

The studio also required a server with a compact design, efficient power and cooling, and competitive price/performance. Using the Sun Try and Buy programme, Blue Sky chose Sun hardware after evaluating competing server solutions by HP and Angstrom.