DreamWorks implements HP systems for Puss in Boots

DreamWorks Animation SKG used hundreds of high-performance workstations, backed up by five server farms, to produce the company’s most technically advanced film to date, ‘Puss in Boots’.

To create the film, artists used more than 200 HP Z800 Workstations. The workstations helped design everything in the film, including characters and digital effects such as complex tornados and cloudscapes.

ProLiant BL460 blade technology, geographically dispersed in five server render farms across the United States and India, provided compute power at crucial stages of production. The blade servers powered 117 terabytes of data and more than 60 million render hours.

“As with all of our films, Puss In Boots required powerful systems to support the digital demands of our creative teams,” said Ed Leonard, Chief Technology Officer, DreamWorks Animation SKG.

DreamWorks also chose networking solutions from HP including 12508 and 5800 series switches, Intelligent Management Centre and Intelligent Resilient Framework to provide improved levels of network performance while simplifying network management across the studio’s scalable 10G WAN/LAN environment.

Additionally, DreamWorks used an X9000 IBRIX Network Storage System, which can scale capacity to respond to the demanding needs of the studio while allowing for future growth.

To meet the massive data demands of the film, DreamWorks deployed HP Cloud Services, which negated the need for an estimated multimillion-dollar physical data centre expansion. Eight million of the total 63 million hours of rendering were rendered using these services, which represented 45% of the studio’s overall cloud computing needs.