DreamWorks Animation Utilizes the Red Hat Portfolio to Build a Private Cloud for Financial and Creative Applications

In August 2010, we announced that DreamWorks Animation was utilizing the Red Hat Cloud Foundations portfolio to aid in the production of its future animated feature film releases.  At the time, Ed Leonard, DreamWorks Animation’s CTO said:

“At DreamWorks Animation, cutting-edge technology is a key enabler to our creative ambition. Red Hat's Cloud Foundations provides a compelling platform to enable our cloud strategy, giving us the ability to quickly scale our compute needs to meet the demands of our productions.”

And Derek Chan, head of Digital Operations for DreamWorks Animation said:

"We've been collaborating with Red Hat for the past year to ensure the MRG components of their Cloud Foundations meet our high-end CG animation requirements. DreamWorks Animation is incorporating Red Hat's MRG into its production pipeline beginning this year.”

Today, we excited to share with you a full case study describing DreamWorks Animation’s use of Red Hat technologies – including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise MRG and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform – to build its private cloud infrastructure.  In addition to cost savings by migrating from its previous grid and virtualization platforms to Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, DreamWorks Animation’s Lans Carstensen, principal engineer, says, “We are very pleased with the technologies from a stability and performance perspective...We’ve seen significant changes in how we can provide resources to our artists by leveraging open source and partnering with Red Hat. Red Hat has impressed us with its outstanding engineering capabilities and commitment to our strategic alliance.”

DreamWorks Animation uses Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies such as load balancing and live migration to keep its mission-critical applications available through planned maintenance.  With the implementation of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, DreamWorks Animation is able to maintain the performance and scalability required for its artists. Not only has the company exceeded its utilization goals in load and stress testing, but DreamWorks Animation has also shown that Red Hat Enterprise MRG can easily scale to support the 30,000+ cores in use and growing ambition.

Read more about how DreamWorks Animation is using Red Hat technologies for its private cloud here.