<p>Rendering today's hottest animated films requires skilled artists, massive compute time, and lots of power. We here at Arc Productions started to get the idea that powering our downtown Toronto studio might be a problem when we had to give up a portion of our parking lot for a new one-megawatt transformer. About a year later, our power bills exceeded $20,000 per month, and we knew we had to make measurement and reduction a core focus.</p><p>We never thought that installing a software solution in our datacenter and working with TSO Logic would not only lead to cutting our "render farm" energy costs, but also provide us more dynamic management of our datacenter operations.</p><p>Arc Productions is one of North America's leading CG animation and visual effects studios. The Arc team has gained recognition in the industry for its animation in the popular feature films Gnomeo &amp; Juliet and 9, and the visual effects work in The Amazing Spider-Man and Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. With more than 250 artists and the latest tools available, Arc Productions brings to life the creative visions of major Hollywood studios, including our own. As you can imagine, the work we perform is computationally intensive. Each frame of a shot, be it animation or visual effects, requires the generation of images using sophisticated computer models. Rendering of some frames can take many hours or even days of compute time.</p><p>To support this work, we utilize 45,000 square feet of workspace, within a 600-server datacenter containing 5,400 power-hungry cores that give us the rendering capacity we need. Our business is characterized by tight deadlines, and our server infrastructure must be available on demand with high-uptime requirements.</p><p><a href="http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=3420&doc_id=269251&f_src=internetevolution_gnews">Keep reading...</a></p>