A SNEAK PEEK INTO DREAMWORK’S DATA CENTER
Dreamwork studios, a leader in animation and graphic imagery have allowed the world to have an insight into its data centers. Considering the amount of computer generated imagery that Dreamwork works on, anyone would think that their data centers are completely cloud enabled and virtualized. But this is a completely wrong idea.
About 15 % of Dreamwork’s servers are virtualized, and 20% run on cloud services. Dreamwork is still finding the need for solid state drives, according to Mike Cutler, global director of Infrastructure Operations at DreamWorks Animation.
Dreamwork took a few attendees of the SNW trade on a tour of its data center at Redwood city, California. Among the other amenities, Dreamwork provides free food for all its employees along with individual medical attention. The doctor’s cabin is located just across the hall from the data center.
The data center contains 3.8 petabytes of disk storage capacity and 4,000 servers with 25,000 CPU cores.
“The number one thing we invest in here to make sure our artists and engineers stay happy is our technology, because that's what they spend their day in. If we don't stay a couple steps ahead of state-of-the-art, they’ll try to go find it somewhere else,” said Kate Swanborg, head of enterprise marketing at DreamWorks.
Dreamwork studio does not use a lot of hypervisor technology in its servers; it invests heavily in state-of-the-art server blades, storage arrays and networks to keep its artists efficient and satisfied.
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