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Price/performance is an obvious consideration for most outfits, but for the Children’s Miracle Network, it is the driving force. Apple’s Xserve RAID and Power Mac G5 tower provides a lithe technology backbone.
Price/performance is an obvious consideration for most outfits. But for the Children’s Miracle Network, a not-for-profit organization whose annual five-hour Celebration telethon raises millions of dollars for 170 North American children’s hospitals, cost savings can literally be a life saver.
Like most nonprofit organizations, Children’s Miracle Network looks to save on costs in many ways. Technology is one area in which it has been successful, having reigned in its spending by electing to edit televised segments in-house using a dual-processor Power Mac G5 tower with Xserve RAID .
Xserve RAID |
“Every time we can spend $1 less on Apple products that’s one more dollar we have to buy a $35,000 incubator for an infant at a NICU,” Children’s Miracle Network Director of Television Production Warren Junium told ServerWatch. (NICU stands for neonatal intensive care unit.) By Junium’s estimate, Children’s Miracle Network has raised 2.4 billion dollars for children’s hospitals since 1983. “That’s a lot of money,” he noted, “but the problem is children’s hospitals give away about $2.5 billion in charity care each year.” In other words, in its 20-plus years of hard work, Children’s Miracle Network has covered just under a year’s worth of charity expenses for the hospitals.
Need for Speed
The backbone of Children’s Miracle Network’s editing facility is its dual G5 tower system, running Panther and connected via dual Fibre to an original Xserve RAID. Although the current RAID offering leaves room for 14 drives, this slightly earlier version of the Mac’s Xserve RAID stacks seven 480 GB drives on one side and four on the other, for a total of 11 drives and 2.2 TB of storage. The unit is configured in RAID 0 mode, which trades speed for a lack of fault tolerance. “Because for the most part we’re video editing, I need the speed, rather than the backup,” Junium said, adding that he backs up project files individually using a Firewire drive.
This configuration runs Apple editing software efficiently, and Children’s Miracle Network, like many Mac-based video production shops, uses Final Cut HD editing and DVD Studio Pro rendering software. Junium says speed was an issue for earlier Apple machines, but the dual G5 server’s speed has made rendering a snap in DVD Studio Pro. “Now with the G5, I have a whole show, multiple layers, and it’s done in 25 minutes,” Junium laughs.
Product Bonding
Despite the performance boost from the Xserve RAID and G5 tower, the Children’s Miracle Network team puts in long hours when a deadline looms. As such, uptime is a huge factor, and the G5 tower/Xserve RAID combination has proven itself extremely stable. The RAID unit has had 122 days (and counting) of uptime as of press time. This number would be higher, but Junium’s group believes in periodically giving the server some time to cool down.
Junium’s team has named its Xserve RAID drives for characters in the Strongbad Flash animated cartoon, and his admitted motive for giving the Xserve RAID downtime when convenient is to “be nice to my little silver box with the pretty lights.”
Children’s Miracle Network has made sure that the love continues by purchasing the AppleCare protection plan for its Apple products. AppleCare extends the typical 90-day product warranty for up to three years. Children’s Miracle Network’s experiences with it have been rare but positive to date. While building up the Xserve RAID to 11 drives, one drive (which was purchased from an outside retailer) came defective. “I had a new drive module overnighted to me the next morning,” Junium said. He then simply overnighted the defective one back. “It was a flawless process,” he glowed.
