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Maya Entertainment Ltd (MEL) is a leading computer animation and visual effects studio for film and television in India. Maya provides design and animation expertise to major corporate and entertainment industry clients worldwide.

Need for Speed
In movie animation, high-resolution rendering is very compute-intensive as well as storage-intensive operation. Files can be as large as half a terabyte (TB). And rendering work is generally done on high-end workstations. When close to a deadline, the animators at Maya used to allocate all the available workstations to high-priority rendering jobs to get them completed on time. This usually leads to unavailability of workstations for the animators. The problem escalated when MEL decided to launch MAAC, the teaching arm of Maya, to meet the scarcity of qualified animators in the country. And to create the best animators, MEL needed the best possible tools, which include the latest 64-bit processing capability, the best graphics cards, the fastest servers and high availability storage.

“We needed someone whocould provide us with a solution,not IT products” Rajesh Turakhia, CEO, MEL

Making High-definition TV movies was also another issue, as they require double or triple the file size of standard TV movies. This needs led Maya to create a rendering farm using the latest server platforms, connected to high availability networked storage that would move the rendering work off the animators' workstations. Maya felt the need of a powerful, highly available, scalable, flexible and cost-effective infrastructure. It decided to revisit its IT and network infrastructure. EMC was called upon.

Upon selecting EMC for the solution, Rajesh Turakhia, CEO, MEL says, “We are not experts in IT infrastructure design, so we needed someone who could provide us with a solution, not IT products. Because low cost is a key reason our clients come to Maya, we did not want to over-invest in IT. There was no question that we wanted to build the rendering farm on EMC storage because of their exceptional performance and attractive price.”

Mission Accomplished
Maya was using an IP-based Storage Area Network (IP SAN) to take a daily back up of all of their rendering and animation work. Maya was getting frustrated with the number of hours their high-end servers were unavailable for both rendering and creative work at the end of the day. EMC and Kaybee Infotech, a Velocity Reseller of EMC recommended a Fibre Channel networked storage solution comprising an EMC CLARiiON CX 300 with approximately 6 TB of capacity and an EMC NetWin 200 NAS Gateway. To manage the information, EMC also provided EMC Powerpath and EMC Navisphere software to discover, monitor, provision, and report on the networked storage architecture.

With very reliable throughput, which the earlier IP based solution was not providing, now Maya could enjoy the robustness and the high availability that a SAN provides, with the flexibility of a NAS.

Benefits Galore
As rendering has moved from animators' workstations to servers, animators' work is uninterrupted. Rendering time for one scene file come down to 17 minutes from earlier 45 minutes.

Turakhia said, “This setup was immensely useful at the time of installation three years before, as it not only catered to immediate needs of the time, but had also taken into consideration future growth. Thus initially we had deployed 2TB, which was soon expanded by another 2TB, due to additional projects running concurrently. The expansion was smooth, modular, and quick. The modular approach is preferred for steadily growing business.”

Since then the speed, reliability, and size of the EMC solution has become an integral part of the business and has helped Maya smoothly execute a lot of national and international projects. This has helped the company meet customers' delivery expectations.

From the CEO's viewpoint, Turakhia adds, “With our Intel and EMC IT infrastructure, we have increased confidence in our ability to meet our delivery commitments. We can even accelerate our efforts if we encounter unexpected delays. This is a major advantage for us in the marketplace.” On the future expansion front Turakhia says, “At the moment the infrastructure is adequate and satisfies present need. However, we are expanding our operations and infrastructure on the CG and VFX front. We are also looking actively at different streams of business. In the very near future we would confidently go ahead with another EMC solution for all our expansion needs.”

Gyana Ranjan Swain and Alok Singh

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