By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
September 5, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Digital visual effects studio Weta Digital (wetadigital.com) announced on Friday it has completed building its new extreme density data center in Miramar, New Zealand.
Founded in 1993 by Peter Jackson, Joe Letteri, Eileen Moran, the Wellington, New Zealand-based visual effects company is responsible for producing Hollywood blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings series and 2005′s King Kong.
Designed and built to accomodate current and future technological demands, the energy efficient facility is unique in that if features frame rendering capabilities but also balancing the investment in floor space, power, cooling, and associated technology.
Weta Digital will be the first in the world to use Hewlett-Packard’s (hp.com) new Double Density server blades, which uniquely combine two independent servers in a single blade.
HP announced on Thursday its new series of products and services designed for virtualization deployment and management including the “world’s first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines.”
“The increased density of the blades allows us to add a significantly higher number of processors into a confined physical footprint while still managing within tight power consumption and cooling requirements,” said Adam Shand, acting CTO of Weta Digital.
The facility’s need for extreme density also posed significant design challenges, but Weta Digital says it was able to resolve these issues by having the right engineering and technology partners involved in the project.
For instance, Rittal’s water-cooled rack enables the facility to control the amount of cooling that a specific rack requires, says Shand, who adds that the self-regulated cooling system can be managed at a granular level for each rack.
