Dygra Films takes Sun over Intel

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Sep 2005

Dygra Films, a Spanish film production company, has replaced its Intel processor-based platform running Windows, with Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and hardware to improve performance of its compute resources. The Sun systems, featuring Sun Fire servers, Sun StorEdge arrays and tape libraries, Java technology-based software and the Solaris 10 OS, have improved Dygra Films' production and procedures for its 3D animation process by 50 percent.

The new Sun systems are being used by Dygra Films' 3D animated film, "Midsummer Dream," which is now showing in more than 60 countries around the world. Dygra Films is best known for "The Living Forest," the first-ever 3D computer-animated feature-length film made in Europe and the biggest box-office hit for a Spanish animated film.

Prior to using Sun systems, Dygra Films was using a compute farm based on Intel processor-based systems and .Net technology. Sun began an evaluation of the existing rendering compute farm at both the hardware and software levels and replaced the Intel processor-based servers with Sun servers powered with AMD Opteron and Spare processors. Dygra Films was able to homogeneously manage the image rendering process and transform their compute resources more effectively with Sun systems. Rendering tests were carried out with the Solaris 10 OS to optimize the rendering process, and improve the main storage system through the implementation of a solid backup structure.

The complete Sun solution includes the Solaris 10 OS, 31 Sun Fire VZOz x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers powered with the AMD Opteron processor, four Sun Fire V240 servers equipped with Spare processors, Sun StorEdge 3510 FC Arrays, Sun StorEdge L100 Tape Library, Java 1.4.2 platform software and Solaris 10.

By using Sun systems running the Solaris 10 OS, Dygra Films was able to remove bottlenecks in the 3D graphic rendering proctss, which helped increase efficiencies and improve production by 50 percent.