ACADEMIA

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- Creating movie magic for Harry Potter, Band of Brothers, Tomb Raider, and the soon-to-be released Shanghai Knights and Die Another Day (Bond 20) is never as easy as waving a wand, but when Cinesite London employed the help of SGI® Global Services and optimized SGI® Embedded Support Partner (ESP), their multiple high-profile projects began running right on schedule. Cinesite, a major presence in London's Soho post-production community since 1991, and its sister facility in Hollywood use a broad range of SGI servers and workstations to provide the film and television industry with everything digital: visual effects, scanning and recording, and digital film mastering. Cinesite London has nearly 100 SGI workstations and servers, including SGI® Origin® 2000 and SGI® Origin® 200 servers primarily used for high-bandwidth applications including file serving and rendering, and Silicon Graphics® Onyx2® visualization systems running Discreet® inferno® and fire® editing and finishing systems. Cinesite's Kodak® Cineon digital lab employs SGI graphics technology. In Cinesite's computer-intensive, deadline-driven environment, system availability is critical. When workstations are not being used creatively, they are utilized as part of a round-the-clock render farm. A down machine is not acceptable. "The entire way the site works relies on the SGI boxes being operational," says Cinesite Senior Systems Administrator Keith Barton, who recently turned to SGI Global Services to ensure continuous system availability. SGI Embedded Support Partner (ESP), an electronic support tool embedded in the IRIX® operating system software on every SGI machine, is a highly configurable monitoring tool capable of tracking many parameters of system activity, availability and performance; it automatically alerts SGI Global Services when a specified event occurs. It can be activated under any SGI service contract and personalized to the customer's requirements. SGI Global Services offers comprehensive, high-quality solutions that enhance and support SGI products. SGI Global Services assessed Cinesite's business needs, identified areas of vulnerability and supplied information about training, consulting, service contract coverage, electronic support and other SGI services, including detailed information about ESP. Once ESP was activated, Cinesite's operating style triggered an unnecessarily high number of calls. ESP was configured to restrict call logging to selected parameters. "ESP is highly configurable," said Barton. "You can switch features on and off easily and set the logging level at which you want SGI to be informed. If you want, you can set it to log every transaction or report periodically to SGI that it is still operating. But things like that aren't always necessary, and you can just switch them off." SGI Global Services conducted a survey and found that Cinesite's many SGI systems, in a variety of configurations, were deployed in the rooms, corners and basements of vintage multistory Soho buildings. Many, but not all, SGI systems were covered by 7x24 SGI® FullExpress(TM) service contracts. In some cases, staff members were calling SGI Global Services for middle-of-the-night service for machines that had single-shift contract coverage. SGI Global Services made a detailed inventory of Cinesite's SGI systems and their service coverage. Each machine now has a plastic-bound card that includes its model name, its configuration, its SGI maintenance coverage and the phone number of SGI Global Services. "One of the things they found most interesting about ESP," said SGI Support Engineer Andy Barrington, "was that they didn't need to troll through endless syslogs and error logs to find that piece of information they needed. ESP would find it for them and set the fix in motion by contacting us electronically-all at no extra charge. They loved it." The immediate savings in costs and the potential savings in availability were obvious. SGI Global Services began working with Cinesite to activate ESP on its SGI machines. "The advantage is that if a machine fails or has a problem, ESP will pick up on it and e-mail the relevant support staff at SGI," added Barton. "They often know about the problem before we do and contact us to say a call has been logged. It accelerates the problem-solving process, because SGI is on the case before we've logged the call. It's fantastic." "SGI service has been brilliant," said Barton. "I've told industry people that it's been the best support service of any computer-based company that I've encountered. A few years ago one of our main servers had a very serious hardware fault early one morning, bringing production to a standstill. One call to SGI and their engineer had us back in production that morning. We were very close to a deadline, and we made it. You don't forget that kind of service. When we log a hardware-related call, the engineer always arrives with the right parts. You won't hear him say, 'I brought the wrong parts. I'll come back tomorrow.' I'm very impressed. SGI service, from my point of view, was already significantly better than the support provided by its competitors. Now ESP gives us another layer of protection." "SGI Global Services is dedicated to customer satisfaction and loyalty, and our efforts at Cinesite are clearly rewarding for both this powerhouse digital facility and for our dedicated Global Services staff," said Terry Oberdank, vice president of Global Services. "At SGI Global Services, we design, implement, support, and assist our customers in any way we can to help them get the most from SGI solutions, whether their requirements are for media, management of complex data, high-performance computing or collaborative visualization." SGI continues to develop this proactive electronic support tool by adding system group management software such as Performance Co-Pilot(TM), a distributed, integrated performance management service. Performance Co-Pilot helps maximize the productivity of SGI servers by delivering sophisticated performance management tools that may be used to optimize system throughput or critical resource utilization, such as automated filtering of large amounts of performance data, powerful and flexible archive logging services, 3-D visualization, and extensibility and customization capabilities.