Happy Feet set in motion at Equinix

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 13 December 2006 11:39

IT Industry - Strategy

After successfully playing host to 4000 servers used by Animal Logic in the production of animated movie, Happy Feet, data centre operators Equinix has signed up the company for an expanded three year hosting contract.

Animal Logic used Equinix's Sydney data centre as its primary production facility for file serving, 3-D rendering and post-production work. According to Equinix Australia managing director Doug Oates, "For Happy Feet and their slate of projects, Animal Logic operated one of the biggest supercomputing sites in the world with over 4,000 CPUs, and the largest supercomputing site in Australia by far. Since their business requirements are constantly changing - based on film and animation projects that are seasonal and often require accelerated ramp up times - Equinix provides a strong option over the complexities and ongoing maintenance costs of managing an infrastructure such as this internally."

"Before we started to gear up for the Happy Feet movie project, we had the choice to build our own data centre or to look for a third party centre," said Xavier Desdoigts, director of technical operations for Animal Logic. "As the challenges around Animal Logic’s accelerated growth became clearer, it made more sense for us to search for a business partner that would be able to accommodate our heavy requirements centred around blade solutions and give us the flexibility and cost effectiveness that our industry demands."

Desdoigts said that, since then, Equinix had been "the principal location for most of the equipment that powers our production infrastructure."

Equinix recently announced a multimillion-dollar expansion that will increase capacity of its Sydney data centre by 50 percent.