DreamWorks chooses HP to store animation film files

HP today announced that DreamWorks Animation SKG, the computer-generated animation company that introduced the world to Shrek, has selected HP scale-out storage technology.

According to DreamWorks, animated content for a feature film such as its recent hit Monsters vs. Aliens creates nearly 100 terabytes (TB) of files that need to be stored in an archive. DreamWorks chose the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage to act as an online reference library for  films such as Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda.

In addition to using it as an archiving solution, DreamWorks will use the ExDS9100 as an online backup solution for ongoing projects.

“Our goal of delivering two to three computer-generated animated films per year means that DreamWorks continues to look for ways to streamline the process of creating and delivering great stories for our audience,” said Derek Chan, head of Digital Operations, DreamWorks Animation.

The ExDS9100 capabilities have enabled DreamWorks to create a 170 TB archive – the equivalent of approximately 36,000 DVDs – as an online storage environment that provides fast, easy access to those files. DreamWorks’ goal is to ‘keep everything,’ and with the ExDS9100’s ability to scale to 820 TB, they are well positioned to do this as well as handle future data growth.

The HP ExDS9100 is a unified system consisting of three primary components:

Performance block: An HP BladeSystem chassis with blade servers offers the performance needed to drive extreme capacity requirements. The base solution now starts with two blades, each of which can deliver up to 200 megabytes per second of performance. This can easily scale up to a maximum configuration of 16 blades with up to 12.8 cores per unit for 3.2 gigabyte per second performance.

Capacity block: The base configuration starts with one high-availability ‘storage block’ and 82 TB of capacity. The maximum configuration supports up to 10 storage blocks and 820 TB of capacity.

Software: The system uses HP scalable file-serving software needed in demanding digital content environments. To reduce system complexity and costs, applications can be run directly on the performance block, simplifying the overall application architecture.