LinuxWorld Canada Keynote – Paul Tsaparis of HP

The second Keynote of the day was from HP Canada CEO Paul Tsaparis. A large part of the keynote was a “Power of Linux” video, which was basically a testimonial from Dreamworks. The video has some interesting bits, but was a little too pro vendor IMHO. The video explained that over 50% of Shrek 2 was rendered remotely “On Demand” (it was all rendered on Linux). This “On Demand” system allowed them to hit rendering peaks and make the deadline for the movie while only actually having to purchase enough infrastructure to do the average amount of computing. This is the direction that a lot of computationally intensive apps seem to be going, and I know that IBM has a similar service. While this is obviously only something that a couple niche industries would use, it is very slick. The best quote from the movie was from a Dreamworks employee (the CTO if I recall correctly), which said point blank “We are interested in Linux”. He then went on to say that Dreamworks went with HP because they understood Linux. Hopefully other companies will listen to statements like this one. While it wasn't disclosed in the video, I'd say the dollar amount for the products and services purchased for Shrek 2 were substantial.
The presentation also explained that HP deploys Linux internally. They don't do so to “eat their own dog food” as some companies claim, but they do if for the same reasons they recommend it to their clients. They have over 13,000 internal devices with Linux installed, their Linux email cluster (15 machines) processes over 3TB of email a year, their entire DNS infrastructure (160 servers) runs Linux, they use Jabber for internal secure IM and much of their wifi network is Linux based.
–jeremy