Network Appliance (NetApp) pioneered the concept of the "network appliance", an extension of the industry trend towards dedicated, specialised products that perform a single function. NetApp storage and content delivery platforms (Filers and NetCache appliances) are coupled with powerful content distribution and reporting software.

NetApp filers are large network-attached storage (NAS) devices that have been used for ambitious, data-rich projects like the NASA Chandra X-Ray project, which includes the orbiting telescope, observatory and data centre. The observatory accumulates massive volumes of data with each experiment, so the multiterabyte NetApp F840 was chosen to support the complex data used for scientific research.

Key features of NetApp storage appliances include:

• Built-in RAID for protection from data loss due to disk failures.
• Hot spare disks for fast failure recovery.
• Redundant hot-pluggable power supplies and cooling fans.
• Battery-backed non-volatile RAM for guaranteed writes.

Weta Digital uses SGI IRIX OS-based Octane visual workstations, Onyx2 visualisation systems, Origin family servers, and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations and servers. Weta's two divisions worked closely together to provide characters, creatures and environments of Middle Earth. Large volumes of data require very fast (Gigabit) networks, so Weta uses Network Foundry's Bigiron line of switches.

Two parts of the trilogy have been released and the third film, The Return of the King, is expected in December 2003. I asked Harry Christian, Marketing Manager, Network Appliance ANZ to give me some "numbers" so that we could get a feel for the size of the task. He provided the following answer.

Each frame of the movie requires 12.5 MB of storage and there are 24 frames for each second of the film. For a three-hour film, that equates to 3,240,000 MB of storage. Weta used two Imagica scanners to scan in each film image at 200 horizontal lines of resolution, and scanned 1.5 million frames (or about 18 TB of images) as live frames prior to adding special effects. NetApp filers store the prework files, which are then made available to artists at Weta Digital. 300 artists then use the filers to add special effects for environments, creatures, and other effects (such as motion).

Each shot can take from two to eight weeks to complete and the shots stay live while they're being worked on. Weta Digital uses anywhere from 1400 to 1600 processors in the facility to complete their work (Intel Xeon 2.2 GHz) and to do rendering day and night every day of the week. It took 40,000 vendor hours per day or 4 million work hours total to render the special effects for the Two Towers film, giving the NetApp systems a huge and intense workout. Scott Houston (Weta CTO) noted that he needed not only huge data capacity, but also massive processing power.