Entering the world of Pixar Animation Studios is like stepping into a movie scene. The lawn is vast and immaculate, the cars in the parking lot gleam, and the sun warms the atrium reception where life-size models of Mike and Sulley, the comical monsters from the company's hit movie "Monsters, Inc.," greet visitors with their lovable smiles.

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The idyllic setting even extends into the IT department.

Sitting in a stylishly ergonomic Herman Miller chair, wearing jeans and sweater, IT executive Peter Kaldis chills out to the Depeche Mode tune emanating from his sound system. Kaldis is a self-styled "Unix Lizard" (he says so on his business card). He is calm and collected despite the pressure he faces fixing bugs and upgrading systems so Pixar's army of animators can use them full throttle in production of the studio's next project, a feature film called "Finding Nemo," about a fish family.

Working through stressful times is nothing new for the laid-back Kaldis, who has seen his share of film production during his five years with Pixar. The 36-year-old Unix and network expert oversees the studio's Cisco 6500-based Gigabit Ethernet-ready backbone plus its showcase Renderfarm. The latter is a throbbing mass of 210 Sun Enterprise 4500 and 40 Sun Fire 3800 servers that do the compute-intensive work of applying correct lighting, textures and shading to 3-D computer images. It took the power of all those machines to make Sulley's blue and purple fur look, and act, so lifelike.

Kaldis, a 10-year industry veteran who hails from Montreal, moved to northern California for the job at Pixar, in Emeryville. He had managed Unix systems at Softimage, a 3-D animation software company once owned by Microsoft. "I was managing Unix at a Microsoft company, so you can see why I left," he jokes.

Kaldis oversees a team of 15 desktop and hardware specialists. They support an eclectic group of 400 people, from developers who write software for Pixar's animation and rendering systems to artists and technical directors who work on movie production.

Pixar, also known for movies such as "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life," wants to cut production of feature-length animations from two years to one. For Kaldis, that means pushing Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop and to the Renderfarm machines, now all served by 100M bit/sec links. He is piloting Gigabit Ethernet at about 20 desktop machines that animators and technical directors use, but has yet to test it extensively. He would like to upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet by year-end, though.

"The real big win for us . . . will be in our Renderfarm. Those machines are a lot more bandwidth-hungry [than the desktops]," he says.

Kaldis otherwise has been occupied migrating from Solaris 7 to 8, upgrading the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol server and adding operating system and driver patches to all the Linux desktop workstations.

Kaldis says the best parts of his job are access to new technology, such as Pixar's state-of-the-art film laser scanner that takes digital images and records them onto film, and working with tech-savvy people. But the latter has its drawbacks. "We get to interact with some smart people who can test and create new technology. The bad is that we end up being the support organization [for that technology], and that support [role] has to be large," he says.

Having creative people around keeps the workplace visually exciting, too. Some employees have painted murals in their offices and others have decorated their doors - one is done up as the outside of a cozy home, complete with white picket fence, and another resembles a military bunker. Even the corridors are wildly furnished with chandeliers, sumptuous velvet sofas, miniature golf courses and a 1970s disco-style beverage bar.

Pixar encourages Kaldis and his colleagues to develop their creative sides by offering art and sculpture classes. "I like to dabble with art," Kaldis says, modestly. "I have taken introduction to drawing and want to take the sculpting class, but haven't had the time."

If not art, then maybe acting.

Sometimes Pixar employees get the chance to lend their voices to animation characters before professional actors are hired. Would Kaldis be interested? "No, who would want to record my voice?" he asks. Who knows, his knowledge of a French-Canadian accent might one day prove just the right touch for a Pixar character.

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