The Magnificent Lucasfilm Data Center

Posted on February 1, 2007

News.com is right that the Lucasfilm data center with its 10-gbps backbone is the envy of IT professionals. News.com says Kevin Clark, director of IT operations at Lucasfilm, is the lucky tech geek who overseas the massive Lucasfilm data center.

For IT professionals, Clark must have one of the most enviable jobs in the world. After all, after spending several years at enterprise software maker Autodesk, he now oversees a 10,000-square-foot data center--Clark said that might equate to the size of a Google data center, or one run by a financial institution, though those types of organizations would operate more of them--that houses the computing guts of the Lucasfilm empire, the corporate umbrella for Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasarts, Lucasfilm itself and StarWars.com.
The data center, which is housed on a lower level of the Letterman Digital Arts Center where Lucasfilm is headquartered, opened its doors in 2005 as Lucas was moving much of that empire to San Francisco's Presidio, a former army base in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, from its previous home across the bay in San Rafael.
And while a major data center move for any company would be disruptive, Clark and his team had to find a way to minimize the impact on the many major motion pictures, video game projects and other initiatives it was involved in at the time.
"If the systems go down here in corporate, you might not have your e-mail for a couple hours," said Greg Grusby, ILM's technical publicist. "If the systems go down in this data center, you lose $50 million."
In fact, Clark said, the data center "far exceeds" the computing power of any other production house in the world.

CNET's photographs of the numerous server racks at Lucasfilm will also make IT geeks drool. There are over 2,000 servers in total at the Lucasfilm data center. Very impressive indeed.