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As part of a technology relationship that began with HP in 2001,
DreamWorks deploys HP Converged Infrastructure
as the technology backbone for complex animation, helping
shape the future of digital filmmaking. To bring feature films to
life, DreamWorks Animation utilizes everything from HP desktop
workstations to HP networking products to HP digital rendering
resources accessed via the cloud.
HP technology has played an integral role in many of DreamWorks'
awe-inspiring films, including the ”Shrek”
series, ”How to Train Your Dragon,”
”Kung Fu Panda” and ”Kung
Fu Panda 2.”
To create “Puss in Boots,” artists used more than 200
high-performance HP Z800 Workstations,
allowing the flawless execution of exceedingly detailed and creative
tasks. The workstations helped design everything in the film — from
the swashbuckling hero Puss, to digital effects such as complex
tornados and cloudscapes.
For ”Puss in Boots,” HP ProLiant BL460
blade technology, geographically dispersed in five server
render farms across the United States and India, provided peak
compute power at crucial stages of production. The blade servers
powered an unprecedented 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.
“Knowing that we have the support of our partners at HP allows us
to free our artists from technical limitations, letting them focus on
creating the most powerful 3-D CG experiences.”
DreamWorks chose HP Networking solutions including
12508 and 5800 series switches, HP
Networking Intelligent Management Center, and HP
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 HP
X9000 IBRIX Network Storage System as
a solution that 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 eliminated the
need for an estimated multimillion dollar physical data center
expansion. Eight million of the total 63 million hours of rendering
were rendered using HP Cloud Services, which represented 45 percent
of the studio's overall cloud computing needs.
“Our decade-long collaboration with DreamWorks has challenged HP
to develop technology that continually meets the intense,
high-performance needs of the world's best digital animators,”
said Santanu Ghose, country head, Converged Infrastructure Solutions,
HP India. “HP effectively serves as an infrastructure extension of
a premiere Hollywood animation studio providing cutting-edge
technology to support some of the most creative minds in film and
animation.”
HP DreamColor technology was utilized in the film's production
process to provide high-end color prints of the creative team's
visual development work. This technology enabled designers to print
accurate color proofs of critical reference imagery such as character
designs, environments and key storytelling moments.
In addition to jointly developing the HP DreamColor technology in
HP printers, DreamWorks and HP also developed the billion-color
DreamColor Monitor, which surpasses performance of any other
LCD display available, enabling artists to achieve consistency, depth
and richness of color.
HP Converged Infrastructure is a key foundation of an
Enterprise. In a world of continuous connectivity, the
Instant-On Enterprise embeds technology in everything it does to
serve customers, employees, partners and citizens with whatever they
need, instantly.
HP's premier client event, HP DISCOVER,
takes place Nov. 29 - Dec. 1 in Vienna, Austria. The event showcases
how organizations can get started on their Instant-On
Enterprise journeys.