Guru Studio

Guru Studio | Media & Entertainment
This is Gold Rush time for media content, says
Yurie Rocha, Guru Studio’s creative director
of production. Entertainment companies
such as Nickelodeon, Spin Master, and
Netix today bring an enormous appetite for
animated shows. In response, Guru Studio
has produced hit after hit. It created Paw
Patrol in collaboration with Spin Master and
Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. It’s the animation force
behind Mattel Inc.’s Ever After High. Expanding
into its own content, Guru created the original
Emmy®- and six-time Annie Award-nominated
preschool series, Justin Time, winner of the 2014
Canadian Screen Award. The shows entertain
children and the messages about cooperation
and kindness are needed in today’s world.
Uncompromising quality
under relentless deadlines
Guru started in 2000 as a small commercial
studio with three employees. Today the company
employs over 300 artists, producers, technical
directors, IT sta, and other professionals. The
weekly deadline pressures of producing TV
series—not to mention commercials and other
projects—are enormous. Where feature-lm
animators traditionally have enjoyed more time
to perfect their content, creating for TV means
nishing fast and moving on. Except today, that
TV show will likely sit next to a feature lm on
the menu of a service like Netix. Therefore, its
production quality has to be comparably high.
“Our work needs to draw in an audience
within a competitive landscape that doesn’t
dierentiate between feature lms or
episodic series anymore. Our consumers are
demanding and what they demand is great
content regardless of budget,” Rocha says.
HP Z Workstations deliver
reliable high performance
That’s where HP Z Workstations come on the
scene, built for reliable high performance and
easy IT manageability. Guru Studio has used
HP Workstations for more than a decade.
“Reliability is a must for us, and getting the
most performance for the investment,” says
Jason Burnard, IT director at Guru Studio.
“Also, the way the HP Workstations are
designed, they’re rock solid, exible, and easy
to upgrade. IT loves working with them.”
Guru Studio has 226 HP Z Workstations, along
with HP Z Display Z22i Monitors. It uses HP
DreamColor Professional Displays, with their
10-bit color precision, to help perfect nal
images. The studio matches its HP Z Workstation
models with the functions they serve.
Animators typically use HP Z420 Workstations
or HP Z440 Workstations. For more-demanding
workloads such as lighting, rendering, and
compositing, Guru uses HP Z620 Workstations
or HP Z640 Workstations—all the way up to
the HP Z840 Workstation, built for high-end
computing and visualization. Guru congures its
HP Z840 Workstation with HP Z Turbo Drive G2
PCIe SSD 250GB and NVIDIA® Quadro® M6000
graphics processing units (GPUs).
HP Z Turbo Drive is a storage solution that
handles large les cost-eciently while
reducing boot up times and increasing
performance. This in turn enables Guru to
“Reliability is a must for
us, and getting the
most performance for
the investment.”
– Jason Burnard, IT director, Guru Studio