EMC’s Isilon scale-out storage decreases project turnaround time and increases energy efficiency by 400 percent
Toonz Animation, one of India’s most successful and prolific animation houses with clients such as Walt Disney, Turner and BBC, has deployed EMC Isilon scale-out storage to meet the demand of a scalable storage solution and increase the speed of production, thereby enabling Toonz to complete multiple projects quickly and in an efficient manner. It has also reduced its energy requirements by 25% percent, decreasing the company’s overhead for power and cooling. Training and guidance from EMC Global Services has resulted in the need for a lean IT team of two-persons to manage the environment independently.
Toonz Animation was running a siloed storage solutions which led to the IT team spending a lot of time managing network performance and consolidation issues. EMC Isilon is the ideal platform to store, manage and protect unstructured data which has enabled Toonz to achieve fast turnaround times and thereby enabled them to engage with multiple studios and work on simultaneous projects. They have experienced vast improvement over the previous storage environment when their team spent hours connecting various SANs. Toonz’s IT workload has tremendously decreased due to the reduction in hours spent dealing with network issues caused by rendering and compositing bottlenecks.
Storage consolidation is another area where Toonz has experienced massive gains. Instead of housing multiple disk arrays, the Isilon S200 scale-out architecture provides the required capacity within a single file system on a few nodes.
Further, the partnership approach to installation and configuration of EMC Global Services has empowered Toonz’s IT team with the knowledge and insight needed to manage its storage environment effectively and independently.
With the Isilon S200, compositors are now able to work on multiple 2K or HD timelines simultaneously, benefiting from more than 1.4 million network file system ops and over 85 gigabytes per second aggregate throughput from a single file system cluster.
K.R Asokan, IT Head, Toonz Animation, said, “The throughput performance of Isilon S200 has a direct impact on the business. We can engage with multiple studios and work on simultaneous projects because we know we can achieve fast turnaround times. Toonz reputation of combining creativity and technology has received a significant impetus with this implementation. The company continues to be a leader in animation in India and is making a real impact in production and distribution of animation and live-action content, gaming content, licensing and merchandising.
Amit Mehta, Country Manager, Isilon Storage Division at EMC India & SAARC, added, “We are delighted to support Toonz Animation in its journey of transformation to cater to the increasing and new demands of its IT environment. The Isilon Solution EMC provides is powerful yet simple to install, manage and scale to virtually any size.”
