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Hollywood studio virtualises IT infrastructure

Pinewood Studios swaps 14 servers for virtual environment.

By Joe Curtis

The studio where Hollywood blockbusters such as Skyfall and Dark Shadows were filmed has signed deals to move to a fully virtualised IT environment.

Pinewood Studios, based in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, has taken steps to virtualise its IT infrastructure, a move it hopes will be cost effective, more flexible and with increased reliability.

The movie and TV studio hopes its new architecture of VMware on HP servers, EMC VNX SAN storage, Citrix XenDesktop virtualisation, and Veeam back up and replication will support filmmakers for the next five years.

IT services firm Codestone designed and carried out the virtualisation of Pinewood’s 14 physical servers to three VMWare vSphere hosts running 30 Windows VMs.

And Pinewood plumped for Veeam to provide its backup solutions, claiming the company has helped it save 15 hours a weekpreviously spent backing up data.

Group IT manager John Chase said: "Over the last 10 years IT has become critical to our organisation and therefore our goal was to create a virtualised environment that incorporates a strategy of high availability and disaster recovery.

"Previously, when we were backing up physical servers to tape three team members would spend approximately five hours each week overseeing the backup-to-tape process, as well as retrieving and reviewing tapes when an item needed to be recovered."

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