“Deep inside an industrial building in Burbank, California, stands the Great Wall of Macintosh — a humming barrier of 700 Apple Power Mac G5s, all meticulously stacked, one atop the other, in a U shape 8 feet high and 100 feet long. Alongside sits an equally imposing server bay, which stores a staggering 700 terabytes of data. Upstairs in a hypersanitized, temperature-controlled chamber, a technician wearing white silk scrubs hovers over two mammoth, $300,000 digital film scanners,” Evan Shamon reports for Wired News.
Shamon reports, “This monumental collection of gear provides the mathematical brawn behind DTS Digital Images, the world’s premier image-processing and -restoration house… The human brain behind the operation is John Lowry, a bespectacled, auburn-haired man who, at 74, doesn’t look a day older than 60.”
Full article here.
More info and images of DTS Digital Images’ wall of Apple Macs: http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/
Related articles:
600 Apple Power Macs used to digitally restore ultimate James Bond collection – June 14, 2006
600 Apple Power Mac G5s used to restore Star Wars trilogy for DVD release – September 13, 2004
Lowry Digital’s 600 Power Mac G5s are forging the future of 4,000 line ultra HD DVD – April 17, 2004
Come out from behind the great wall. Join the Social.
The People’s Socialish Movement
So, more importantly, how many fps in Doom?
Xbench probably justs weeps softly instead of returning results.
Looks like my office.
I’ll take two of those rooms, please.
(One for backup, of course..)
What exactly can you do with 700 terabytes of data? You could… dare I say it… rule the WORLD!!!
one word: xgrid
… all meticulously stacked, one atop the other,
It’s not true! Look at the picture … they have shelving! Geez, they were smart enough to buy Macs but not smart enough to shelve them? “Hey we stacked them one on top … don’t TOUCH (crunch … crash … spindle … mutilate) t h a t . . .”
Curious that he should want so many of them in one place but neglect to go with Xserves. A TB of data per system? Can I ‘borrow’ one please? When you’re done with it/need to upgrade?
Hey. He’s an OLD guy, reached puberty before I was even born! Maybe a 74-year-old times 700 Macs is the reason the stats say Mac owners are so old?
DLMeyer – the Voice of <a href=”http://glhorton.podomatic.com”>G.L.Horton’s Stage Page/a>
And they’re using PowerMacs instead of much more compact and efficient XServes… why, exactly?
In the past year or so, those servers held a lot of James Bond movies — Lowry was the place that cleaned them up frame-by-frame for the DVD box sets that were just released.
XServes did not have quad processors while the G5 did.
Which OS is used? There is mention of Linux desktop in the article.
One 74 year old guy takes care of 700 Macs. He looks very relaxed and happy.
How many IT guys does it take to support 700 Windows machines?
He needs to get up to speed by replacing those Power Mac G5s with Mac Pros!
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“How many IT guys does it take to support 700 Windows machines?”
All of them.
And a few more that are just now being crotch squirted.