ChallengeUp-and-coming animation studio

ToonBox Entertainment, Ltd. was

looking for a partner to meet its

hardware needs. Because of its

unique approach to 3D animation,

the company places exceptionally

heavy demands on both workstations

and the servers in its render farm.

SolutionAfter thoroughly researching its

options, ToonBox decided to

standardize on Dell™ hardware.

It populated the render farm with

25 Dell PowerEdge™ rack-mounted

servers with Intel® Xeon® processors.

For end users, the company rolled

out Dell Precision™ workstations.

Benefits• 100% availability of server farm

over 10 months

• Rapid expansion of render

farm through plug-and-play

server architecture

• 2-fold more frames rendered in

server farm creating 3D animations

Application areas• End User Computing

• Green Efficiency

• Virtualization

Customer profile

Company ToonBox

Entertainment, Ltd.

Industry Arts, Entertainment

and Media

Country Canada

Employees 120

Web site toonboxent.com

“A high image quality is the top of the pyramid. To get to that level, you need great people, great technology and fantastic hardware. Dell computers give us one level of the pyramid.” Andrew McPhillips, CG Supervisor, ToonBox Entertainment, Ltd.

ToonBox Entertainment renders twofold more frames to create high-end 3D animations

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“We focus on telling the story in stereo right from the beginning,” says Andrew McPhillips, CG supervisor. “As we make decisions about where things are in terms of the left and right space on the screen, we also consider how to position them from front to back. The stereo format is informing the way we tell the story. There aren’t many other companies doing this the way we are.”

High-end animation requires high-end hardwareToonBox is a young business, but it hit the ground running. “Our TV series, ‘Bolts & Blip’, is the first 3D stereoscopic animated series released to the world and the regular CGI version has sold in over 70 territories globally,” says Thom Chapman, vice president. “In a short period of time, we penetrated the world with the first product we brought to market.”

Achieving this goal places heavy demands on ToonBox’s workstations and servers. “Doing animation our way involves more work,” McPhillips says. “A lot of the 2D cheats that you can do in compositing, we can’t do anymore. In addition, we essentially have two cameras, since viewers have a left eye and a right eye. We need very solid hardware, and we need all of it to work together seamlessly.”

As the ToonBox team prepared to start the stereoscopic animation for “The Nut Job,” they looked for a new studio space and a hardware vendor to furnish it.

Technology at work

Services

Dell™ Support Services - Dell ProSupport™ Mission Critical with four hour onsite service

Hardware

Dell PowerEdge™ C6100 servers with Intel® Xeon® processors 5600 series

Dell PowerEdge R710, R510 and R310 servers with Intel Xeon processors

Dell PowerVault™ ML6020 tape library

Dell Precision™ T5500 workstations with Intel Xeon processors 5600 series

Dell Precision T3500 workstations with Intel Xeon processors

Software

Adobe® Photoshop® and Premiere® Pro

Autodesk® Maya® and SketchBook® Pro

eyeon Software Fusion™

FreeBSD

Linux distributions including Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora Core and Debian

Microsoft® Exchange Server

Pixologic® ZBrush®

VMware® ESXi

Windows® 7 Professional

Windows Server® 2008 R2

xCAT

“We’re sticking with the Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers and Intel Xeon processors because we’re confident everything is going to work. Dell and Intel offer a very stable, safe environment.” Aaron Pearce, Systems Administrator, ToonBox Entertainment, Ltd.

In a nutshell...

After being banished to the city, the mischievous Surly Squirrel

and his rat friend Buddy plan a nut store heist of outrageous

proportions and get caught up in a convoluted bank heist. The

plot is engaging, but to captivate a broad audience, Surly and

Buddy need to be rendered beautifully. Toronto-based ToonBox

Entertainment Ltd. is delivering leading-edge visuals for “The Nut

Job,” its first feature-length stereoscopic film, by rethinking the

basics of 3D animation.

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“Our original space wasn’t appropriate,” McPhillips says. “There wasn’t even air conditioning. When we planned the move to our current facility, we began to spec out our IT needs.”

The company shopped around for a hardware partner. “It was critical to select the right vendor up front because we were looking for a long-term solution,” says Ria Westaway, vice president of production. “Our research was extensive; we looked at numerous vendors. We chose to partner with Dell, given their expertise, their hands-on guidance, and their direct, personal communication and support. Some of the vendors made us feel like we were not their first priority because we are a small company. Dell treated us as their first priority. That commitment to our needs helped us make a decision relatively quickly.”

Render farm generates twofold more framesToonBox standardized on Dell for both servers and PCs. For rendering, the company selected Dell PowerEdge C6100 rack-mounted servers, each with two Intel Xeon processors 5600 series. “We chose the Dell PowerEdge C6100 because it offers a strong balance between budget and power,” says Aaron Pearce, systems administrator. “The C6100 is actually four server nodes in one 2U chassis. Each server node has two six-core Intel Xeon processors, and they’re hyper-threaded, which means each one appears as two virtual processors to the operating system. This brings us to 96 cores in each of our servers. Right now we have 25 servers, so that brings us to 2,400 cores.”

“For every animation we produce, we’re rendering twice as many frames as we would in 2D,” McPhillips says. “Each shot in our rich and highly detailed film is comprised of dozens—sometimes even hundreds—of layers. Feature-length animated films typically have more than 1,000 shots. Because ‘The Nut Job’ is 3D, we are rendering each of those shots

twice, once for each eye. We are putting incredible demands on the machines in our server farm. In this environment, the Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers have been fantastic. They run nonstop, 24×7, and they perform with flying colors. The C6100 makes a great render farm machine because it’s fast, highly configurable and incredibly robust.”

Pearce estimates that the Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers take up about the same amount of floor space as blades with equivalent specs. “However, these servers will be cheaper for us to maintain because they use a more standard set of hardware,” he says. “They also handle heat very well. In our last studio, our temporary server room sometimes reached about 36 degrees Celsius (almost 97 degrees Fahrenheit). We had 10 PowerEdge C6100 servers at the time, and they ran without any problem.”

Reclaiming 50 hours a week of IT staff timeAs the company grows, the full hot-plug serviceability of each server node facilitates rapid expansion of the render farm. “These servers enable us to scale up and down very easily,” Pearce says. “Adding a Dell PowerEdge C6100 server is basically plug-and-play. We receive a server, drop it into our infrastructure, install software and that’s it. It becomes part of our farm, as easy as that.” When the company produced a three-minute teaser for “The Nut Job,” it had to scale up rapidly. “The plug-and-play capabilities of the PowerEdge C6100 allowed us to grow very, very quickly,” Westaway says.

At the same time, the servers came with built-in management controllers that simplify ongoing administration. “We make heavy use of Dell remote management capabilities using the on-board Baseboard Management Controller,” Pearce says. “This is saving our IT administrators a lot of time. As an example, we need to install different operating systems for testing purposes. We’re currently running

“When you’re on the cutting edge of what can be done in animation, you need a solid backbone. Selecting Dell as our hardware partner was one of the best decisions ToonBox has made.” Andrew McPhillips, CG Supervisor, ToonBox Entertainment, Ltd.

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Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora Core, Debian, FreeBSD and Windows Server 2008 R2. We could have an IT person connecting to each machine by hand, installing an operating system and then configuring it. This would work out to approximately 50 hours per week. Instead, we use xCAT, which can automatically deploy a preconfigured operating system and software set by hooking into the Baseboard Management Controller. It deploys a new operating system across the entire server farm within minutes and takes almost no staff time.”

100% availability over 10 monthsSince deployment 10 months ago, the ToonBox render farm has achieved 100 percent availability. “Everything in the PowerEdge C6100 servers is redundant,” Pearce explains. “If we have a failure, we’re just going to remove the failed component, fix it in-house or call Dell ProSupport for extended support. A motherboard in one of our servers had a small issue reading a piece of memory, and because we have Dell ProSupport on the machine, the motherboard was received and replaced within an hour and a half of failure. That turnaround by Dell ProSupport was absolutely fantastic.”

The company intends to continue adding Dell PowerEdge servers as its rendering needs grow. “We’re sticking with the Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers and Intel Xeon processors because we’re confident everything is going to work,” Pearce says. “Dell and Intel offer a very stable, safe environment, and keeping IT equipment as stable and safe as possible is among our top priorities.”

McPhillips concurs. “The robustness of the Dell equipment and the way everything works together give us a lot of peace of mind,” he says. “I’ve worked

in other studios where we’ve had to worry about the render farm, but so far, our Dell hardware has been fantastic. Dell makes my life a little easier.”

4 administrators manage 31 servers, 138+ workstationsMost ToonBox end users have Dell Precision workstations running Windows 7 Professional. Those who work mostly in Autodesk SketchBook Pro, Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Premiere Pro typically receive Dell Precision T3500 workstations. “We selected those workstations because they’re tiny powerhouses,” says Pearce.

For artists who work primarily in Autodesk Maya, eyeon Fusion or Pixologic ZBrush, ToonBox provides Dell Precision T5500 workstations. “For users who do a lot of heavy renders, we allocate Dell Precision T5500 workstations because they have a significant amount of power for a desktop workstation,” Pearce says. “They have Intel Xeon processors 5600 series. They are very powerful machines that facilitate the type of work our artists are doing.”

Most of the company’s back-office functions—including a licensing server, Microsoft Exchange Server and a wiki through which artists collaborate—run in a VMware-based virtual environment. More than 30 virtual servers run on two Dell PowerEdge R710 hosts and one Dell PowerEdge R510 host, all with Intel Xeon processors. “We’ve virtualized pretty much everything we can,” Pearce says. “Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) enables the processor to split up resources for different virtual machines managed by the VMware layer. It works fantastically. Our Dell and Intel hardware is enabling us to make excellent use of the resources we have without

flooding our server room with excess equipment, power consumption and heat.” Dell PowerEdge R310 servers run a redundant firewall and proxy server, and for backups, ToonBox uses a Dell PowerVault ML6020 tape library.

Four IT employees currently manage 31 servers and more than 138 workstations companywide, but ToonBox is growing rapidly, adding an average of five new employees each week. “Because of our growth, we’re constantly refining the way that we manage our equipment,” Pearce says. “We’re in the process of evaluating the Dell KACE K1000 Management Appliance and Dell KACE K2000 Deployment Appliance, which look like they’re going to be very useful.”

Road map to the top of the pyramidTo see that it selected the right hardware partner, ToonBox needs to look no further than its high-definition, stereoscopic animations. “In our teaser for ‘The Nut Job,’ the image quality was so high that people couldn’t believe we did it in the time frame we did with the resources we had,” McPhillips says. “That validates our decisions, because a high image quality is the top of the pyramid. To get to that level, you need great people, great technology and fantastic hardware. Dell computers give us one level of the pyramid.”

The IT environment at ToonBox is even helping the company recruit animators. “Our brand new, state-of-the-art equipment is a big draw,” McPhillips adds. “When you’re on the cutting edge of what can be done in animation, you need a solid backbone. Selecting Dell as our hardware partner was one of the best decisions ToonBox has made. It has been a fantastic relationship.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit dell.com/servicedescriptions © May 2012. Intel and Intel Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States or other countries. Microsoft, Windows and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties - express or implied - in this case study. Reference number 10010089

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