When Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. introduced Synergy (combined compute, storage and network hardware in one chassis) two years ago, the company claimed it would sharply reduce data center costs and provisioning time. Now, DreamWorks Animation LLC, the legendary animation studio (home of “Shrek,” “Madagascar” and “Kung Fu Panda”), is offering evidence that the technology enabled it to bring 200 servers operational in 98 percent less time than traditional hardware. And that’s not just a cartoon storyline.

“We were able to provision all of that, from the time we mounted it in the racks, within five hours,” said Jeff Wike (pictured, right), senior vice president and chief technology officer at DreamWorks Animation LLC. “It took us longer to take them out of the cartons than it did to provision.”

Wike visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris) during the HPE Discover EU event in Madrid, Spain. He was joined by Ric Lewis (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. They discussed the benefits of using Synergy in the data center and a new HPE multicloud management tool. (* Disclosure below.)

One film equals 80 million CPU hours

Synergy uses built-in software intelligence and auto-discovery capabilities to speed up a process that can normally stretch over multiple days. DreamWorks needed on-premises compute capability that could handle complex, data-heavy animation content requiring more than 80 million CPU hours just for one film, according to Wike.

The software-defined networking solution enabled the studio to make more compute resources available to its creative team while reducing time for managing the infrastructure. “In what other area can you actually reduce the number of people that are maintaining something while you are doubling the amount that you are maintaining?” Wike asked. “That never happens.”

During the HPE EU gathering, the company introduced a new multicloud management solution called OneSphere. Using a software as a service portal, OneSphere offers a pool of resources for both public cloud and on-prem environments.

The new solution can work with any public cloud platform. “A core pillar of the HPE strategy is to make hybrid IT [information technology] simple,” Lewis said. “It allows you to build clouds, deploy apps and insights extremely fast.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover EU event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover EU event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE