Brocade's networks were crucial to the crafting of India's first stereo 3-D animated film

10th August 2012
Brocade's  networks  were crucial to the crafting of India's first stereo 3-D animated film
Reliance Animation's CEO Ashish Kulkarni, flanked by ( l) Edgar Dias, Regional Sales Director ( Enterprise) and (r) K.P.Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director, Brocade Communications, at the media event in Bangalore, August 9 2012 ( IndiaTechOnline photo)

'Krishna aur Kans' released nationwide this week;  culmination of 5 year project at Reliance Animation

Bangalore August 10 2012: Reliance Animation, makers of India’s first stereoscopic 3D animated feature film, 'Krishna Aur Kans',  released this week, banked on networking and switching infrastructure across its campus and data centre, from Brocade Communications, the San Jose-California-headquartered leader in end-to-end networking solutions.

Says Ashish Kulkarni, Executive Producer of the film and CEO, Reliance Animation: “Network performance and stability plays a crucial role in production of complex digital content such as Krishna Aur Kans. Brocade switches with their key advantage of being supremely efficient in redundancy and availability was a natural choice for the studio on its way to creating the most appreciated digitally animated content. Being the first and foremost studio in end-to-end IP creation, the technology selected was the best and network backend infrastructure was engineered to integrate all the elements seamlessly”.
Adds K. P. Unnikrishnan, Director, Asia Pacific Marketing, for Brocade Communications, “The primary challenge while designing the IT infrastructure at Reliance Animation was to have a high performance and reliable network and data center infrastructure. The "Network" being the arterial nervous system of the studio consisting of 500+ artists working on high quality digital content in a 24/7 operation needed to be designed in way such that reliability could be taken for granted”.
Brocade met the challenge of handling enormous amount of data traffic (voice & video) without dropping a single packet that could cause delay or disruption in the customized pipeline which was being deployed. Brocade’s BigIron RX backbone one of the most powerful Ethernet switch families in the industry. and FastIron Series Layer 2/3 switches were deployed.
The production of the epic involved some 1200 artists generating 43 terabytes of data related to video and digital contents of multiple applications like Maya, Mental Ray, Flash, Photoshop, Aftereffects, Harmony, Nuke and Shake.
The strength of the network was put to the test when online editing and finishing tools such as Autodesk Flame were directly accessing data over network instead of localized copies of data. This helped in reducing turnaround times in the production cycle enhancing overall production quality and timelines.
Ninety percent of Fortune 500 companies deployed Brocade network infrastructure and 62 percent of Storage Area Networks worldwide and 90 percent of Internet exchanges were powered by Brocadde, explained Unnikrishnan. 
The company had its largest R&D team in India where many of its solutions were crafted added Edgar Dias, Brocade’s Bangalore-based Regional Sales Director – Enterprise ( Asia Pacific) www.brocade.com  
Reliance Animation’s under production ventures include a 26-episode, 33-minute TV serial, Shaktiman – India’s own superhero and a 52-episode, 11-minute educational serial, Big Bees, about the wonders of nature. www.relianceanimation.com