NetApp and DreamWorks Animation Extend Multi-Year Alliance

NetApp Inc. announced the renewal of its strategic alliance and co-engineering partnership with DreamWorks Animation LLC.

NetApp will remain DreamWorks’ preferred cloud data services provider, and with the support of its solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud, the studio will continue to evolve its hybrid cloud environment to ensure enhanced productivity, flexibility, and agility.

With the release of its latest animated feature Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, DreamWorks Animation marks more than 25 years pushing the boundaries of both animation and the technologies they use to bring films to global audiences.

From the very beginning, NetApp has provided the studio with solutions to manage its increasing production demands and data complexity. Additionally, the co-engineering partnership brings together engineers from both organizations to solve real-world engineering problems focused on optimizing workflows in a hybrid cloud environment, while decreasing latency.

“We’ve worked in lockstep with DreamWorks Animation to enable the studio’s digital transformation journey and accelerate its growth with NetApp’s product portfolio and the innovations resulting from our co-engineering efforts,” said Gabrielle Boko, CMO, NetApp. “NetApp’s All Flash Array solutions were the foundation of the hybrid storage required to manage the production’s complex data requirements, and it simplified the workflows for the giant character model of Ruby Gillman, so that the animators were focused on creativity, not capacity management.“

Technological advancements resulting from the NetApp and DreamWorks alliance include:

• Improved performance using NetApp AFF in DreamWorks’ HPC environment and the ability to tier data more efficiently to NetApp StorageGrid.
• Increased agility by extending applications to the cloud using Azure NetApp Files and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, while extending geographic reach to support distributed resources.
• Decreased latency and a reduced datacenter footprint with ONTAP systems utilizing NetApp AFAs for energy and rackspace efficiency.

“In 2018, we moved from being a NetApp customer to engaging with them as a valued partner that brought the best of both companies’ resources together to accelerate our digital transformation,” said Bill Ballew, CTO, DreamWorks Animation. “Unlike many other businesses that simply rely on data, DreamWorks’ actual end product is completely composed of data. In fact, we generate up to a petabyte of data for each film, and we couldn’t bring the imaginative storytelling of our animated films to life without the world-class data management services that NetApp provides.“

Together, the 2 partners work together to continually evolve the tools and techniques needed to raise the bar of visual storytelling for each film at the studio. NetApp provides DreamWorks Animation with technologies to manage the massive amount of data generated in production, while balancing storage performance, flexibility, and cost.

Resources:

• DreamWorks Animation and NetApp: Unleashing Imagination with Data
• Customer Success Story: DreamWorks Animation Takes Imagination to New Heights