Case Study: Weta Digital achieves 30% faster rendering with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Apollo 6000 System

Weta Digital Bringing The Hobbit to life with HPE Compute

Weta Digital, the Academy Award–winning visual effects studio in Wellington, New Zealand, needed more compute capacity to meet aggressive production deadlines for films such as The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. To accelerate rendering throughput and enable heavier, more photorealistic scenes, Weta Digital turned to Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its HPE Apollo 6000 System (including HPE ProLiant XL230a Gen9 servers).

Hewlett Packard Enterprise deployed a rack-level HPE Apollo 6000 solution (400 servers, 40 enclosures, 10 power shelves) with HPE networking and management tools, installed on a six-week schedule with partner support. The HPE solution delivered about 30% faster render performance versus previous servers, used roughly 25% less power, helped achieve a PUE of 1.1, sustained 50–100 TB overnight render throughput, and enabled orders-of-magnitude increases in scene complexity (from ~50,000 to ~50 million polygons in the same time).

Weta Digital

Kathy Gruzas

CIO