Young Company Wants to build a Farm... Good Idea?

[lucasbartosiewicz]

Hey guys! First post!!!

 

I love you all and aspire to learn what you know!!!

 

I have started my own office, and have a client base which is growing beyond my capacity, asking for more and more! I love it, but right now I can't keep up. I'm looking to expand my office, and hire some new talent... but I don't have any computers for them to work on...

 

After doing a lot of reading and researching it looks like I can build 1 or 2 Workstations at around $1500 each, and then have a render farm linked to my office server with a few i7 nodes.

 

My reasoning is that I can scale if need be and everyone can share the power of the farm, each on a medium strong workstation, instead of dropping $4000 for each workstation. and also keep adding nodes to the farm if I need it.

 

Two questions...

 

1. Does this strategy make sense to you guys?

2. Are there confirmed threads on how to build a farm, and what the best practices are... Or an IT company that does this work in the NorhtEast USA that would be good to call?

 

Thanks!

[Nikolaos M]

I'm not experienced in rendering farms or render nodes, but hanging around various CG forums for some time now, I see that what you're thinking is a sensible strategy and a common practice. Relatively cheap but fast Workstations with an emphasis (greek word ) in single threaded performance and a decent gpu, and 1-2 render nodes (depending on the total budget) with the "big boys" (i.e. Xeons etc) inside ready to pull the rendering tasks, while keeping the Workstations free of rendering workloads and able to do what they were bought to do, and that is modeling, designing etc whithout performance "hiccups" due to resource absorption.

 

It's important to mention the software you work with, along with the rendering method and programs you use in order to have the best advice and help on what to get and how to connect each part.

 

I hope others will give you more information about all this.