Puss in Boots powered by HP

Stephen Withers
Friday, 09 December 2011 07:42

Business IT - Technology

The collaboration between DreamWorks Animation and HP continues with Puss in Boots.

HP kit was used in the production of DreamWorks' Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kung Fu Panda movies. That tradition continued with Puss in Boots.

More than 200 HP Z800 workstations were used by artists working on Puss in Boots, with an unspecified number of blade servers doing the rendering in five locations. According to HP officials, the blade servers handled 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 at DreamWorks Animation. "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."

Other HP products used for the project included HP 12508 and 5800 series switches, HP Networking Intelligent Management Centre, HP Intelligent Resilient Framework, and HP X9000 IBRIX Network Storage System.

The company also used HP Cloud Services to avoid a physical data centre 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, HP officials said.

"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 Raymond Maisano, group manager - industry standard servers at HP South Pacific. "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."