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According to DreamWorks Animation's Senior Director of Digital Operations Ryan Granard, the beauty of producing animation in a hybrid cloud environment is its ability to leverage infrastructure resources rapidly and as needed. This enables DreamWorks artists to "focus on making the movies they want to make, not just the movies that fit within the resources within our walls."

In an interview with Asia Cloud Forum, Granard talks about the nuts and bolts of cloud computing adoption in one of the world's largest animation production studios, which newly released 3D animation "Puss in Boots" (pictured).

Ryan Granard: There are two key data challenges in animation. The first one was there were lots of data! Each film requires on average approximately 800 million files and over 100 Terabytes of data. That means we have a lot of data to either move/copy or compute/generate.

Latency is another one. To effectively move some 500,000 render jobs nightly through our production pipeline, we need resources that are connected to us with as low a latency as possible. Longer latencies can work, but they create too much inefficiency and “wall-clock” time given the amount of work to be done.

Granard: The three key attributes to cloud services are: who you trust, how you consume, and how you account or pay for what you consume.

DreamWorks Animation has worked with HP as a close partner for many years. They had been assisting in our ability to render extremely complex imagery at our desks (via HP workstations), in our own data centers (using HP blades), and in remote HP rendering facilities -- before “cloud computing” became a popular phrase.

HP helped in our adoption of Linux in 2000 and remote rendering in 2003 on “Shrek 2” and “Madagascar”. A key factor in considering HP is the breadth and depth of both commodity and custom services they can provide.

Today, we utilize HP hardware and services for our private cloud rendering facilities, and we utilize HP's fixed and flexible computing services extensively to augment that private cloud capability.

We've also been working closely with HP on the development and implementation of their public cloud services, to enable even more flexibility.

Granard: The concerns were both common and specialized for every business, and often within each line of business. 

DreamWorks Animation didn’t approach cloud utilization as outsourcing, but as global resource augmentation; in this case, via a hybrid cloud model (private and public cloud resources). 

Security is extremely important to us and we depend on HP for secure cloud computing. We leverage techniques such as caching that allows us to utilize these resources while ensuring that data is transient wherever possible. This allows us to focus less on backup and recovery, etc., as origin data remains within our walls. 

Our rendering processes are also extremely granular and layered such that leakage of an individual render job's data won't result in loss of our overall assets. 

In many ways, DreamWorks Animation is uniquely positioned to leverage cloud resources quickly, with basic but reliable controls around asset access while we leverage more extensive audit and control capabilities within our various toolsets.