On Friday I had to travel to Toronto to visit one of our biggest new customers, CTV. They are getting set up for the olympics this winter, and they needed help diagnosing some last minute video capture issues that came up. Luckily the problems were easy to identify, and hopefully I will be able to get them up and running with some fixes early this week.

While I was there, I snapped this photo of the makeshift server room that they are using to test the character generators that they purchased from us. Every machine in this picture (except the one that is open) is one of our Inscriber G7 systems. Seeing a room like this makes me very happy, especially since each one of those systems costs tens of thousands of dollars. CTV won the exclusive broadcast rights to the olympics this year, and this rack of CGs will be doing all of the graphics for that broadcast. Once they are finished testing this week, the systems will be packed up again and shipped to their final destination, ready to provide live olympic coverage to the entire country.

The G7 systems pictured here are real powerhouses. Each one can handle two full HD channels with a multi-core CPU and independent GPUs for each channel. They also come with two mirrored boot drives and an array of eight media drives for speed and redundancy. In short, they are ultra cool machines. It kind of makes me wish I had a TV station just so that I could use them.

I guess I can't complain: I've had one of these sitting on my desk for the past two years. My job does have its perks. I always get to play with the latest technology!

Technical details: This photo was taken with my Sony Ericsson K790a at 5.2mm, ISO 640, f/2.8 for 1/8th of a second.

Comments

How cool to see your work in action like that!
Reminds me of the time we were
studying the hockey game intently at a pub, looking like real fans, when in
truth, you were telling us all about the graphic displays. :) Good luck with
the fixes.

Looks cool Mike! Do they pack you up and ship you to Vancouver to stand by for
any fixes? That would be nice. 

Thanks!  Unfortunately no... no free trips to Vancouver for me.

Wow, an impressive rack.  Are each of those systems 5RU units?	I guess a pair
of drives for the OS + 8 drives in RAID 0 striped?  Very cool.

Close... actually the systems are 4RU, the pair of drives for the OS is RAID 1
and the media drives are RAID 5, so you can actually hot swap bad drives if
necessary.

It would be nice if the media drives were RAID 0... we would be
able to squeeze a few more MB/s out of them.  We're starting to look at solid
state drives now, which are super cool.  We built a system and the disk reads
were only being limited by the drive controller!