Infotech Lead India: Reliance Animation has tied up with Brocade to upgrade its campus and data center network with new switching infrastructure.
Brocade’s network assisted Reliance Animation for the digital production of its recently released film Krishna Aur Kans, India’s first stereoscopic 3D animated feature film.
“Network performance and stability plays a crucial role in production of complex digital content such as Krishna Aur Kans. Brocade switches with their key advantage of being supremely efficient in redundancy and availability was a natural choice for the studio on its way to creating the most appreciated digitally animated content. Being the first and foremost studio in end-to-end IP creation, the technology selected was the best and network backend infrastructure was engineered to integrate all the elements seamlessly,” said Ashish Kulkarni, executive producer of the film and CEO, Reliance Animation.
While designing the solution, Brocade’s goal was to fit in a right networking core which would handle enormous amount of data traffic without dropping a single packet that could cause delay or disruption in the customized pipeline which was being deployed.
Reliance Animation’s IT crew tested multiple technologies in the networking forefront in the likes of Brocade and other competing vendors. Brocade’s BigIron RX backbone and FastIron Series Layer 2/3 switches were deployed. Brocade provided double the 10GbE and 1GbE ports in a single shelf system compared to competing offerings.
The production of the epic involved Terabytes of data related to video and digital contents of multiple applications like Maya, Mental Ray, Flash, Photoshop, Aftereffects, Harmony, Nuke and Shake to name a few.
Network was put to best use and performance was actually witnessed when the online editing and finishing tools such as Autodesk Flame was directly accessing data over network instead of localized copies of data. This helped in reducing turnaround times in the production cycle enhancing overall production quality and timelines.
“The primary challenge while designing the IT infrastructure at Reliance Animation was to have a high performance and reliable network and data center infrastructure. The Network being the arterial nervous system of the studio consisting of 500+ artists working on high quality digital content in a 24/7 operation needed to be designed in way such that reliability could be taken for granted,” said KP Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director for Brocade Communications.
