Three Cheers for Crest Animation and its brilliant technology team!
Mumbai based Crest Animation Studios, which has many firsts to its credit has just recieved the Maharashtra IT Award ‘07 – Media & Entertainment for its outstanding deployment of technology in the media and entertainment space.
Led by AK Madhavan the Crest Team including head of technology Shajy Thomas and Storage Specialist G Hariharan recieved the prestigious Award at the hands of the Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh at the Maharashtra IT Awards held earlier this evening at an exclusive function at Malabar Hill.
Dignitaries present included Kamalnath (Minister Industry and Commerce),V K Jairath (Principal Secretary Industries), Rana Jagjit Singh Patil (Minister for agriculture, industries), Ashok Chavan (Minister industries & Mines, Cultural Affairs, Protocol) and Vijay kalantri (President All India Association of Industries,Mumbai)
The jubiliant team from Crest first shared the good news with AnimationXpress.com.
Crest CEO A K Madhavan commented, “Recognition coming from the government of Maharashtra is as exciting as winning an Annie Award. Also this Award comes in quick succsession of our winning the NASSCOM award a few months back. We have always focused on deploying the best available technology and breathing additional gutso into it with innovation and resourcefullness which the Crest Technology team is renowned for. This Award is dedicated to my technology team.”
Shajy Thomas, head of technology at Crest Animation shared about the strength of the technology deployment at the studio, “We have once again proven to be amongst the strongest IT forces in the digital media space. Technology deployed in the right form drives the productivity of the company to a very high extent and helps explore the possibility of single resource utilization for multiple projects.”
He pointed out that Crest was currently able to handle multiple SD and HD projects parallely because of its consolidated IT setup.
“Consolidation of the network comprises of a very high throughput Storage, High performing rendefarm(HPC) and a very strong backplane network” he shared, adding, “In the animation industry there is a huge requirement for the storage bandwidth for which we have deployed a HPs EVA 8k storage with 12 node EFS polyserve cluster , which is claimed by HP as the largest polyseve EFS cluster in the world. The storage is designed with polyserve dynamic file system for dynamic load balancing via round robin and multi path access to a single file”
He further elaborated that the Crest network has a very strong backplane with gig networks and more than 24 of 10 gigs, fully redundant and non blocking architecture, more than 500 HPC based render farms processing around 6.5Tera flops.
“Users in Crest authenticate through a single ldap , which authenticates them for the storage access, renderfarm management and the user profile, and keeps the users independent of any specific workstation.” he added proudly.
Storage Specialist at Crest, G Hariharan shared, ” The Animation industry is always hungry for storage capacity and throughput, keeping this in mind we along with HP designed a high throughput, scalable solution. The setup comprises of HP EVA 8K , with 12 nodes EFS cluster polyserve. This helps a faster multipath access to a file system. Dynamic loadbalancing through round robin. Because of this design, a total consolidation of storage, renderfarm and production workstation was achieved. It prevents duplication of data and considerably reduces the amount of time taken for data transfer between the production storage, compositing storage and renderfarm storage nodes”
Krishna Prasad, ex CTO of Crest Animation and currently CoFounder of DuxSoft remarked, “The approach to technology, management of it and correct decision making is important and all of that is just the right combination at Crest. Security, Storage Systems, Networking, Consolidation, are the multiple factors that have contributed to Crest‘s bagging this Award”
“World‘s largest HP based polyserve has been deployed at Crest. A lot of complexities were involved, but accepting the complexity and extracting the benefit out of it was the main thing. Technology is actually making it possible for maximum effeciency in terms of resource management.” he concluded.
Way to go!
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