When it comes to managing the many terabytes of visual effects content produced by Stargate Digital for TV productions such as Spartacus and ER, the studio's director of IT Joseph Meier says that his staff's job is twofold: It must ensure efficient work flows with minimal interruptions and implement affordable systems that it can basically plug in and let run without intervention. Given Stargate Digital's data explosion over the past few years—now at more than 22TB and growing—Meier's first step toward fulfilling his role was to simplify the company's IT infrastructure. "In the past, we had a lot of Macs and SGI systems as well as Windows-based platforms. Moving information across the platforms was more trouble than it was worth," says Meier. The team's solution was to reduce the number of operating systems in use to just one—Microsoft Windows. "Having a single platform makes information flow and work flow more efficient," he says.
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