GNU/Linux may not have any pro-grade film editing software for the consumer market, but the film studios use Linux in every aspect of film production. Now Red Hat has added another feater in its hat as DreamWorks Animation SKG is using Red Hat Enterprise MRG as the grid infrastructure of DreamWorks Animation's 30,000+ core render farm. The mega studio is also using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the platform to run mission-critical services on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

DreamWorks Animation has been a Red Hat customer for more than a decade. The company founded by Steven Spielberg first deployed Red Hat Linux in its mission-critical render farm. It adopted Red Hat Linux as the core operating system for its render farm, which is now comprised of thousands of servers used to compute and produce the final frames of DreamWorks Animation's movies.

DreamWorks switched from a proprietary solution to open source after realizing that commodity hardware powered by open source operating systems could give them the ability to scale to address the company's growing creative ambitions.

Lans Carstensen, Principal Engineer, DreamWorks Animation stated, "Red Hat software is a key enabling technology for our animation pipeline."

"We've been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in our render farm since our move to x86 platforms," Carstensen said. "The Red Hat distribution was stable and robust for us. We've worked closely with Red Hat over the years to make it even better as our use has evolved."

Gradually, DreamWorks Animation began shifting other systems and applications over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on HP servers, from mission-critical rendering to corporate financial applications. "For any application we're considering, one of the first questions is whether it runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux," said Carstensen.

Red Hat says that "Today, almost every DreamWorks Animation artist has Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop running on the latest HP workstation and nearly every DreamWorks Animation server is powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux technology running on the latest HP servers."