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Awards

Red Hat Innovation Award Winner

Company: DreamWorks Animation

Innovation Award Category: Superior Alternatives

Industry: Entertainment

Geography: Glendale, California, and Redwood City, California

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise MRG, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

BACKGROUND

DreamWorks LLC was formed in 1994 as a creative collaboration between Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen with the goal of producing a diversified mix of high-quality entertainment. In 2004, the animation division formed a new company under the name of DreamWorks Animation SKG (DWA) and went public. Priding itself on being on the leading edge of both creative artistry and technology, DWA's objective is to release between two and three feature-length animated films a year that carry its trademark qualities of combining compelling narratives that appeal across generations with striking computer-generated visuals. DWA is based in Glendale, California, and Redwood City, California.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

DreamWorks Animation SKG has been at the forefront of the animation industry's use of open source infrastructure software to enable high scalability and reliability since adoption of Linux in 2000. More recently, DWA saw an opportunity to simultaneously reduce proprietary grid middleware costs, while also integrating open source messaging and application middleware with its next generation animation platform.

SOLUTION

DWA had a large install base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and decided to work with Red Hat on a broad project to replace a competitor’s load-sharing software with MRG Grid, using KVM virtualization technology and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in lieu of Xen-based systems or VMware for Linux systems, integrate MRG Messaging into its animation pipeline middleware.

DWA decided to double-down on its existing partnership with Red Hat around Red Hat Enterprise Linux on incorporating the desired open source technologies into theirr infrastructure. The company jointly established a process for managing the portfolio of engineering, consulting, and support engagements around the various new technologies and projects. DWA worked daily with the MRG engineering and consultant teams on development and adoption of the renderfarm, and also jointly coordinated focused support engagements for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

For MRG Grid in particular, Red Hat consultants worked side-by-side with DWA job submission and execution workflow developers for over a year on technology integration, and conducted several engagements with MRG engineering around ensuring scalability that resulted in key product changes. Working closely with Red Hat engineering helped DWA meet their production testing goals and scalability requirements.

BENEFITS

The MRG project resulted in a direct cost reduction for DWA. At first, the company had concerns about the risk associated with the MRG transition to production, as their rendering infrastructure is core to their business and any issue would have direct impact on artist productivity. DWA’s careful coordination with Red hat helped mitigate that risk and the transition was made smoothly. The smooth transition, value received, and close coordination to mitigate risks resulted in the project team being awarded for technology achievement within DWA.

In addition, the value gained from DWA’s MRG project better positioned their infrastructure for adoption of cloud computing. MRG Messaging and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization enabled the company to build out its next generation services-based infrastructure. Without Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, the company would have needed significantly more physical servers to support the level of concurrent development and scalable deployments needed.

The DWA team was directly engaged with Red Hat engineering with Red Hat Enterprise MRG, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, which in the end, enabled them to meet their key milestone dates, scalability goals, and was critical for the success of their projects. Red Hat illustrated its dedication to providing its customers with the highest quality of service, and proved its commitment to continually honoring the technical excellence of its products.

DreamWorks Animation SKG worked closely with Red Hat to jointly deliver a varied technical project slate while putting the complete scale of its infrastructure behind Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The company relies on open source and partners like Red Hat to help deliver reliable and scalable infrastructure software for its animation production environment and beyond.