A Virtualized Data Centre Meant Big Savings for Crest Animation Studio

Summary:

As animation studio Crest took on more prestigious projects like making the India’s first animation feature film, , it’s computing needs required about 900 servers. They needed to make do with 450.This unenviable job got Shajy a huge challenge which he met with a definitive solution – virtualization.

Highlights:

Thomas designed a virtualized datacenter that provided the canvas for all of Crest’s dream projects to take shape. Thomas’s plan is a 1,500 sqft datacenter, which houses 450 servers.Crest’s 200 TB of storage is the world’s second-largest polyserve-based cluster storage.

Reader ROI:

How to get 450 servers to do the job of 900How to leverage non-working hours to double server capacity

Organization: Animated films like Shrek and Ice Age have opened a whole new world of storytelling replete with spectacular imagery and awe-inspiring action, thanks to the evolution of 3D animation and graphics. Unknown to many, some of those fascinating characters were brought to life on workstations at the Crest 3 animation studio in Mumbai.

We needed at least 900 servers to generate the computing capacity required to support our projects, but we didnt have resources to do it.

Business Case: Although Crest started life by providing special effects to Indian movies, it gradually moved into 3D animation. “We were shifting our business model from 2D to 3D to TV series to high-end DVD series to feature films,” explains Shajy  Thomas, head-technology, Crest Animation Studio. In 2005, Crest bagged a coveted project to produce the first, indigenously-produced, Indian animated feature film. From there, Crest steadily took on prestigious projects one after another expanding its horizon and garnering awards and recognition. In the meanwhile, however, the company’s 150-server datacenter was beginning to feel the heat. That’s because the process of rendering — integral to creating computer generated imagery or CGI — needs a lot of computing power to convert wire-mesh technology into a viewable format. “We needed at least 900 servers to generate the computing capacity required to support our projects,” says Thomas. “But we neither had the resources nor the buy-in for that kind of an investment.” It wasn’t only server requirements that bogged Crest down, storage and network needs also increased rapidly. It became difficult to analyze peak and non-peak times and schedule resources. “This was crucial because we used to depend on third-party applications for our rendering needs and this made flexibility and optimum resource utilization a challenge.”

We needed at least 900 servers to generate the computing capacity required to support our projects, but we didnt have resources to do it.

Project: Fortunately, creativity wasn’t in short supply at Crest. Thomas designed a virtualized datacenter that provided the canvas for all of Crest’s dream projects to take shape. Thomas’s plan is a 1,500 sqft datacenter, which houses 450 servers. The new facility, with the additional servers and the cost of manpower, worked out to about Rs 8.2 crore, says Thomas. Challenges: The cost of the project could have been much higher if Thomas had not wrung out every last bit of cost from each process. The servers they used, for instance, were configured on Open source relieving Crest of license hassles. The OS and applications were stripped and fine-tuned to achieve maximum performance. The grid and applications were developed and integrated completely in-house. Thomas further integrated about 400 workstations in Crest’s Mumbai office so that during non-working hours they doubled up and added to server capacity. Benefits: Crest’s 200 TB of storage is the world’s second-largest polyserve-based cluster storage. To support high data travel, Thomas designed a redundant, load sharing, non-blocking network architecture with 10G/1G interconnects. Where they placed racks, cables and the air-flow mechanisms was designed to reduce any kind of space and resource waste. The entire datacenter is designed with zero over-provisioning and still achieves its goals. And that’s how Thomas got 450 servers to do the work of about 900, saving Crest Rs 28.4 crore. The datacenter also uses 35 percent less electricity, which has helped reduce Opex by 30 percent. When Alpha & Omega, India’s first animation feature film releases in October this year, you’ll know what went into it.