Imagi Studios has selected Datacraft to build a highly scaleable film production and data storage solution in order to manage the massive volumes of data required for the next generation of CG animated movies. The new business win reinforces Datacraft’s foothold in the media and communications industry, which is a key market focus.
Renowned for its expertise in the development and production of CG animation, Imagi Studios is bracing itself for an industry-wide storage explosion tied to the launch of new 3D technologies that is revolutionising film-making. Just as movie making is growing more complex, Imagi ‘s Studios needed a more sophisticated rendering solution to match its burgeoning creativity. Currently, Imagi Studios is working on several projects including Astro Boy for release next year and Gatchaman for release in 2010. Looking further into the future, the studio is expecting to have a new film for release every 9 to 12 months.
To address these challenging demands at a critical time, Datacraft was tasked with developing a storage system that could deliver linear performance scalability to handle the anticipated data explosion much more quickly than before. For Imagi’s solution, Datacraft selected specialist storage management software from Ibrix; the leader in scalable file serving solutions. Datacraft is now Ibrix’s sole partner in Asia; and subsequently has become the only IT partner in the region capable of implementing a storage system that can handle any type or size of data processing requirements.
The new storage solution has been designed and implemented by Datacraft at Imagi’s Hong Kong headquarters and features 24 Dell servers and two EMC Clariion CX3-80 storage devices equipped with 486 disks backed by Ibrix Fusion storage software. The new system allows an aggregate throughput of 4GB of ‘read-only’ data and 1GB of ‘writable’ data, easily surpassing competing suppliers that offered no more than 1GB ‘read-only’ and 300MB ‘writable’ data. This increase in I/O throughput means shorter overall rendering time and more room for creativity, whilst simplifying management and reducing the total cost of ownership.
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