Case Study: DreamWorks achieves hybrid-cloud production agility with NetApp

DreamWorks Animation takes imagination to new heights

DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind hits like Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and The Bad Guys, faced rising production complexity as each film generates hundreds of millions of files and petabytes of data handled by hundreds of artists. The pandemic and evolving workflows accelerated the need for greater agility, scalable storage, and consistent data access across on‑premises and cloud environments to keep productions on schedule.

Partnering with NetApp, DreamWorks built a hybrid cloud control plane on top of its ONTAP-powered on‑premises infrastructure using microservices and containers, and deployed solutions such as FlexCache, StorageGRID, Active IQ, Astra, and Azure NetApp Files. The result: seamless data access regardless of location, scalable capacity without new data centers, 20% of The Bad Guys rendered in the cloud (300M compute hours), a 90% drop in storage management tickets, and faster, more flexible production workflows that let artists focus on creativity.

DreamWorks

Skottie Miller

Technology Fellow