TVSquad

Unfortunately, the post title is not referring to episodes of the construction paper cartoon coming to the iTunes Music Store, which I still think that's a little ways out. Instead, this article explains the migration of the animation studio to new Apple Xserve arrays.

GEEK ALERT! "J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, said the show was simply running out of storage space on its digital linear tape (DLT) library and direct-attached disk storage from Ciprico Inc., in Plymouth, Minn. So in May, a new linear tape open (LTO)-2 tape library from Exabyte Corp. in Boulder, Colo. and three Xserve RAID disk arrays from Apple Computer Inc. were installed."



This new system will allow them to backup their work almost four times as often, giving the animation team a little more breathing room. For those that don't know, Parker, Stone and company have often gotten episodes done literally hours before they air. It allows them to remain timely, but also forces them to work without a net; if disaster struck, they would lose nearly a day's worth of work on the old system, while only about an hour with the new one. This is good news, as hopefully the guys will be willing to work a little closer to the edge now and make even more "relevant" episodes, which always seem to be their best. Let me know what you think.