Needs with the Animation Program

The animation lab on the main floor is not on lab replacement money. This is because the goal of the animation program is to be self-sufficient through an endowment fund. They have received a $500,000 donation, and some of that will go toward upgrading computers. The original equipment was from donated money 3 1/2 years ago. They will be buying more memory, faster graphics card, big monitors that they can draw on. A lab in the HFAC is also supported with this new donation. Likewise the render farm, which is 9 years old now.

Longer term, they would like to use the render farm for tests, and then render to the cloud when it is heavily used. They have tried us on this network but it won't let their files out; it works in Crabtree. They are not clear on what the issues are. Rendering in the cloud is very inexpensive. Can't justify the costs of their own render farm, but it is nice to have a local farm for testing. They would like some Dreamcolor monitors.

Would like staff to help maintain the computers they have, figure out cloud rendering issues.

If we need rendering bandwidth, then we should approach OIT to get more.

Common File System

We polled the faculty informally at our meeting. They voted for:

• centralized file system with backup 7
• file system that provides just online backup 3
• outsource via DropBox or other 4
• status quo 4

Some indicated that we could setup a system and it could be used for both purposes 1 and 2.

One concern was to investigate a range of prices, especially on the lower end with cheap drives. Some faculty have purchased NAS systems with RAID for a lot cheaper than what we are proposing.

Some would like to find out what we have available in our current array to run a test – maybe setup a couple TB and see how that goes.

We have a 20 TB system, quote is 20 G per person.

Get a quote from Ryan and get a quote for what he built. Specs and available space.

Daniel will talk to faculty to determine whether a non-backup system suffices for their needs. We can later look at tape backup versus online backup to Amazon.

Back to top