It takes a lot of data to make Shrek. The big guy has to run, eat, talk. How much data? We’re talking in the order of data centers to process the bits to bring the warm-hearted monster to its animated life.
The making of an animated film is a look into the changing world of networking and its importance in the making of just about anything these days.
The big question in today’s networking world is how to reduce network complexity and reduce all the power it takes to manage data centers.
That’s the issue Dreamworks faces. Today it was announced the studio has chosen Hewlett-Packard to revamp the networking infrastructure so it can efficiently produce films such as Shrek.
Dreamworks is in the business of making animated films. The studio has to have the ability to make films efficiently. In many respects, the number of films that Dreamworks produces in a year is dependent on how well it can use its network to do the core processing of the animated characters it is producing.
It’s a similar comparison to what we see with the real-time Web. The Internet is at the center of a dynamic supply chain that requires real-time information to be delivered to the right people in the supply chain as events occur.
The challenges are similar in a studio where the network is at the center of the film production process.
The evidence is in the credits of any animated film. The number of specialists required to make an animated film represents the bulk of the people employed to produce it. The network is critical for these people to do their work. It’s at the center of the film production process.
The Dreamworks story is a window into the new networking reality. The studios face challenges with producing high-quality films quickly and efficiently. For mot enterprises the challenges are different. They are not processing animated characters. Instead the increasing challenge is the structured and unstructured data that has to be organized, stored and shared.
Networks are at the center of that issue, too. Companies like HP are betting on the premise that the data center network requires a converged infrastructure to manage the complexities of the Web oriented enterprise.
The battle is for the network.
