Case Study

Weta Digital: Bringing “” to life with Objective HPE Compute Accelerate rendering throughput to meet production deadlines Academy Award®-winning studio Approach Deploy the HPE Apollo 6000 System renders 30% faster with the HPE Apollo with HPE ProLiant XL230a Gen9 Servers

IT Matters • Increased performance by 30% compared to earlier servers • Reduced power consumption by 25% compared to earlier servers • Achieved a low power-usage- effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.1

Business Matters • Deployed a business-critical system in six weeks to meet aggressive production deadlines • Helped the company stay at the leading edge of the digital visual effects industry ©2014 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURES INC.

Weta Digital has a showreel A force behind films filled with Hollywood hits Although it is a hemisphere away from including “The Lord of the Hollywood, Weta Digital is an ever-present heavyweight in the movie industry. From Rings Trilogy,” “Avatar,” “Iron its base in , , the Man 3,” “Dawn of the Planet visual effects studio brings the visions of Hollywood directors and producers to life in of the Apes.” In 2014, Weta dramatic form. From the stunning realism and Digital turned to HPE for a emotional depth of the apes in the “” franchise to the battle next-generation computing scenes in “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five solution based on the HPE Armies,” the Weta Digital team makes it all real Apollo 6000 System. for movie audiences. The industry has taken note of the company’s accomplishments. Weta Digital’s trophy rack includes five ® for Best Visual Effects. It took those Oscars® home Case study Industry Page 2 Weta Digital Digital visual effects

“HPE is a close partner of ours. They really listen and try hard to understand what we’re doing and collaborate with us in order to deliver the best solutions for our business.”

— Kathy Gruzas, CIO, Weta Digital

for its work on “The Lord of the Rings: The To deliver ever-more realistic visual effects Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Lord of the on tight timelines, Weta Digital has an Rings: The Two Towers,” “The Lord of the ongoing need for more processing cores, Rings: The Return of the King,” “,” more memory, more storage, and more I/O and “Avatar.” bandwidth. That’s the story behind the visual effects for “The Battle of the Five Armies,” To work its movie miracles, and meet the the blockbuster that hit the theaters in late aggressive deadlines of the film industry, 2014. It’s also the story behind Weta Digital’s Weta Digital continually looks for the latest adoption of the HPE Apollo 6000 System. and greatest computing capacity. That was the case when the company won the contract “When we bid a movie and get a large-scale to produce the visual effects for “The Battle project, that drives our IT purchases,” explains of the Five Armies.” This win created the need Graeme Demmocks, Weta Digital’s head for more computational power, for which of Production Engineering. “If we’re doing the company acquired the Hewlett Packard a large movie like ‘The Battle of the Five Enterprise (HPE) Apollo 6000 System to Armies,’ then we know that we’re going to enhance its existing render wall. need to deliver around three hours of content, and we’re going to have to purchase the IT infrastructure to deliver that film.” Landing the HPE Apollo 6000 System With the goal of accelerating throughput for complex renders and enabling artists to When Weta Digital gears up to work on iterate more, the company set its sights on a new film, it invariably needs to rev up the latest and greatest technology: the HPE the computing capacity in its render wall, Apollo 6000 System with the latest Intel® a massive compute cluster that currently Xeon® processors. At the time, the HPE encompasses more than 5,000 HPE servers Apollo 6000 System was so new that it was spread over 60 racks. The performance of available only as a pre-release product. the render wall is the key to meeting the constantly rising expectations of directors, With contractual commitments on the line, producers, and an ever-more-sophisticated it was critical that the new hardware could movie-going audience. be purchased, delivered, and installed on time. Engineers from Fujitsu, an HPE partner, “We’re constantly being called upon to do worked with key HPE R&D engineering more with less, and to push the envelope resources, HPE support engineers, and HPE in terms of creativity and what’s possible in presales architects to install the servers, visual effects,” notes Kathy Gruzas, CIO of enclosures, and power shelves that went into Weta Digital. “Audiences are expecting more the system, along with networking equipment, and more reality. They want to really believe cabling, and firmware upgrades. what they’re seeing on the screen.” Case study Industry Page 3 Weta Digital Digital visual effects

“HPE came through,” says Andy Wright, the Accelerating the data and render wrangler manager for Weta Digital. “We gave them an extremely tight creative process deadline, and they exceeded it. We gave them In the eyes of the IT professionals at Weta a six-week deadline from our order to ship Digital, the HPE Apollo 6000 System has all and install, and this was pre-release hardware the right stuff—in terms of processing power, at that stage. We were getting it hot off the memory, I/O, and storage—for accelerating factory floor. As soon as they built it, they the throughput of workloads running on the shipped it to us, and we were installing it. At company’s render wall. At peak production, the end of the day, we were able to install the the wall can render 50-100 TB of data HPE Apollo 6000 System in time to render overnight. That kind of performance allows out the movie.” the company’s creative team to do more of the things they do best.

A rack-level solution “The goal of Weta Digital is to make the best With the HPE Apollo 6000 System, HPE visual effects pictures we can, hopefully better took an approach that thinks beyond just than anyone else,” Demmocks says. “And to the server and creates a rack-level solution do that, we need compute, and this is where designed to provide the right compute for the our IT infrastructure and HPE comes in. By right workload at the right economics. having the best infrastructure, we allow the artists to iterate, and the more iterations that The HPE Apollo 6000 System starts with the artists can do, the better product that a modular 5U chassis that holds up to 10 we can deliver. With the Apollo 6000, we’re independent trays. The HPE ProLiant XL230a finding that artists can iterate more.” Gen9 Server tray selected by Weta Digital has one 2P server with the latest Intel Xeon The benefits of lots of compute power and E5-2600 v3 series processors, providing up to memory capacity become more apparent, and 512 GB memory and up to 4 TB of storage. more vivid, when a flood of bits and bytes morphs into dramatic on-screen images with Collectively, the HPE Apollo 6000 System photorealistic qualities, the stuff that happens deployed at Weta Digital encompasses 400 overnight on the Weta Digital render wall. servers, 40 enclosures, and 10 power shelves. In addition, the company deployed HPE “On ‘The Battle of the Five Armies,’ we had Networking A5930 switches as part of an these massive scenes with a huge number of end-to-end HPE-based solution for servers characters,” Demmocks says. “With the Apollo and networking. 6000 Gen9 series, we were able to push them through on one machine, whereas previously On the software side, Weta Digital leverages we might have had to split them up onto four a homegrown rendering platform named or five older-generation systems to get them Manuka, which currently has about a million through.” lines of code, along with commercial rendering products, including Pixar’s RenderMan. In The HPE Apollo 6000 System is making addition, the company uses HPE Integrated magnitudes of differences in rendering Lights-Out (HPE iLO) for remote console production—literally. With the new system, access and systems management and HPE the Weta Digital production team can render Systems Insight Manager for power utilization 50 million polygons in the amount of time reporting. that it previously took to render just 50,000 polygons, Demmocks says. This advance allows the team to render more complex and complicated images, which equates to more photorealistic scenes in the finished movie. Case study Industry Page 4 Weta Digital Digital visual effects

“There’s not a desire to make things faster,” performance increase on the next tier down— Demmocks says. “There’s a desire to make on a previous level of render servers—and things more complicated and more realistic. they do that with about 25% less power,” The Apollo 6000 System allows us to have Gruzas says. more complexity.” The HPE Apollo servers and enclosures are “It’s a beautiful system,” adds Luca Fascione, air cooled. By leveraging a dense air-cooled head of Rendering and Research for Weta server rack design, external power shelf, Digital. “It’s very easy for our rendering and and the HPE Advanced Power Manager, IT departments to work with it and keep it the HPE Apollo 6000 System can provide healthy, which means that in terms of slowing more servers per rack than competing blade us down, it always stands out of the way, and solutions to overcome floor-space constraints that never happens, which is great.” and reduce energy consumption.

To further hold the line on costs, Weta Digital More performance leverages liquid cooling in the racks in its at a lower cost render wall. The liquid cooling system takes advantage of Wellington’s cool climate, which With thousands of high-performance servers allows for Weta’s render wall to be cooled via in its render wall, including those of the heat exchangers and the cost of running fans HPE Apollo 6000 System, Weta Digital and pumping water through a series of water focuses not just on performance but also towers on the roof of the data center. on server power consumption and server acquisition costs. The racks, provided by Ritall, an HPE partner, are encapsulated to allow each to have its “Power and acquisition cost are two of our own cooling environment. main concerns,” says Gruzas, the company’s CIO. “And I think the HPE Apollo architecture With its reliance on water cooling technology, was really designed with our sort of market in Weta Digital has achieved a remarkably low mind. It’s a great product in that respect. It’s power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.1. power efficient. It’s performant. And it just has The PUE metric, used to gauge the energy the components that we need and not all of efficiency of a data center, divides the power the extra bells and whistles.” that comes into a data center by the power used to run the computing equipment in the For Weta Digital, the HPE Apollo 6000 facility. “At 1.1, it’s one of the lowest PUEs I’ve System equates to a big jump in performance heard of in the Asia Pacific region,” Gruzas at a big decrease in power consumption. says. “The HPE Apollo servers deliver about a 30% Case study Industry Weta Digital Digital visual effects

Customer at a glance

About Weta Digital “The HPE Apollo servers deliver about a 30% performance Weta Digital is a world-leading visual increase on the next tier down—on a previous level of ren- effects studio based in Wellington, New Zealand. Led by Senior Visual Effects der servers—and they do that with about 25% less power.” Supervisor , Weta Digital is known for uncompromising creativity and — Kathy Gruzas, CIO, Weta Digital commitment to developing innovative technology. From groundbreaking performance-driven digital characters like , Kong, and Caesar to the revolutionary virtual production workflows of “Avatar” and “The Hobbit Working with HPE The bottom line? Trilogy,” Weta Digital continues to break down barriers between live action and CG Weta Digital has a long relationship with “I would recommend HPE,” Gruzas says. and expand what is possible in film. HPE—one that spans many generations of “They have a long-term history of technical Application the HPE ProLiant server family. innovation as well as just being a wonderful Digital visual effects for feature films company to deal with. I think they’re very The company uses HPE servers on its ethical. They’re determined to do the right Hardware render wall, and it makes heavy use of HPE • HPE Apollo 6000 System thing in every way, particularly by their workstations and HPE monitors, specifically customers. And I just find them a pleasure • HPE ProLiant XL230a Gen9 Server the HPE DreamColor professional displays, and an inspiration to deal with.” • HPE Networking A5930 switches which are used widely in the visual effects • HPE Advanced Power Manager industry.

Software “HPE is a close partner of ours,” Gruzas says. • Homegrown and commercial rendering “They really listen and try hard to understand platforms what we’re doing and collaborate with us in • HPE Integrated Lights-Out order to deliver the best solutions for our • HPE Systems Insight Management business.” HPE services • Warranty support uplift on the systems, She notes that HPE has shown a true interest power shelves, and server enclosures in the visual effect industry, as well as the broader movie industry. “They have spent a lot of time—and development work— partnering with us and others in the industry, and it really shows in the products they’re Our solution partners delivering. They’re very relevant.”

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