Dreamworks and HP Fishing in the Clouds for Animation Power

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HP and DreamWorks Animation have a long and vibrant history of collaboration in the development of tools for empowering creativity. To date, HP and DreamWorks have produced tools that have become standards including the Halo Telepresence Solution, the HP Dreamcolor Displays and the HP Proliant Servers.

As we know today, the term cloud has become the next big bet in both the computing and the media and entertainment fields. HP and DreamWorks have been working together on the cloud based animation rendering solutions since the development of Shrek 2. During that production, DreamWorks was “maxing out” their capacity both from a server capability perspective, but also from an infrastructure (space and power) perspective.  To assist DreamWorks, HP provided the studio with a farm of servers at their facilities in Palo Alto which DreamWorks leveraged on a utility basis. Just like staff augmentation, HP provided computing power augmentation and that allowed DreamWorks to finish their highly acclaimed film on time and on budget.  An interesting aspect of the solution was the fact that since DreamWorks didn’t actually buy the computing machines outright, they didn’t have latent unused servers when the production wound down.

HP has taken the lessons from DreamWorks, its web hosting solutions, and its hardened infrastructure outsourcing solutions and combined them into media and entertainment specific solution called the HP Media Cloud.

The basic offering of the HP Media Cloud include:

• Flexible cloud service for compute on demand
• Range of service from bare metal to production ready servers
• Pay by the use model

The new offerings benefits include:

• Reduction of overall cost of production
• Eliminates a major capital expense from the content producer and moves that cost into an operation budget.

Today, DreamWorks Animation is moving to this new HP Media Cloud solution as are other clients in the Media and Entertainment space.

To learn more about HP's Cloud Offering please read the HP ViewPoint paper: "Moving Media and Entertainment to the Cloud."

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