Double Negative VFX studio chooses HP HPC blades

New HP servers and cooling technology boost performance while keeping power costs down

Green Zone features VFX by Double Negative

As films boast ever more intricate and pervasive digital visual effects, so visual effects houses must invest in ever more powerful computers to create and render them.

Europe's largest provider of film visual effects, Double Negative, was forced to double its compute power, and chose to buy 256 HP ProLiant BL280 G6 blade servers, 12 HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures and the HP Modular Cooling Systems Generation 2 (MCG G2)

The company assessed offerings from Dell, HP, IBM and Sun initially but Double Negative head of infrastructure Steve Lynne explained that price was the deciding factor.

"For us, rendering kit is commodity hardware, so a lot of the features that the big vendors like to shout about are lost on us," said Lynne.

"We're looking to get as many processors as we can, with as much memory behind them, for the least amount of money. On this occasion HP came in well below everybody else," he added.

Double Negative deployed the 12 MCG G2-cooled HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures in a new datacentre several months ago, then fitted a mixture of IBM and Sun blade servers from an older datacentre into the racks. The space in that old datacentre was then used to install the new ProLiant hardware.

"We're really pleased with the BladeSystems, some of the Sun blades gave us problems when deployed in other racks, but the G2's had 32kW of cooling capacity per rack, and these dealt with the Sun equipment well,” explained Lynne.

Double Negative’s new datacentre has 12 cooled racks and eight non-cooled racks used for networking and patching panels to connect users' desktop systems.

Regarding the business benefits of the new hardware systems, Lynne said: “The rollout makes existing assets more energy efficient. We’ve achieved both cost savings and operational improvements as a result. The HP blades have given us a 90 per cent increase in compute power.

“If we’d used older generation Intel processors, our power use would have gone up by 20 or 30 per cent. Our overall power demand has increased but by far less than this amount.”

As to Double Negative’s future requirements for processing capacity, Lynne explained that it would keep growing.

“Towards the latter half of the year we'll probably have to add more capacity, because we've got lots of new shows coming in and we'll be busy for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Recent VFX work by Double Negative includes Harry Potter – The Deathly Hallows, Sherlock Holmes, and Green Zone.