By donning a data-consolidation and storage ‘glove’ that could empower staff to overcome immense challenges, the firm has improved operations MARVELously

When enjoying sci-fi movies such as Marvel’s Avengers, we may notice the end credits featuring India-based visual effects studio PhantomFX.

In manifesting seemingly impossible action sequences on screen, the firm has also had to deal with its own sets of Herculean production challenges.

Each department operated its own separate storage system, leading to inefficiencies that impeded the creative teams’ meeting of tight deadlines. At the same time, the film industry was grappling with a rising tide of ransomware threats, prompting the PhantomFX team to prioritize enhancing business resilience by bolstering data protection measures. Additionally, as part of its commitment to reducing its overall carbon footprint, the firm had a pressing need to curtail energy consumption.

Said the firm’s IT manager, Boopathy Thangamuthu: “The timelines for movies are very tight, and we need to be fast and accurate in what we do. If artists lose time in copying data to and from the storage system, it leads to a waste of production time and money.”

Three Hulk-sized challenges solved

To overcome the three challenges, PhantomFX took the following measures:

  • To improve productivity and accelerate time to market: The firm engaged a consolidated data platform that reduced the internal data siloes, now reducing up to 30% of delays. The cloud platform’s flash based storage also helped the firm reduce the number of storage latency issues to almost zero, even for the most data-intensive projects.
  • Increasing business cyber resilience: Already a ‘data-secure ecosystem’, the firm’s migration to a secure data platform has strengthened its security posture even further. Additionally, the flash based platform is inherently able to restore data quickly in any crisis, and help PhantomFX resume business operations in hours rather than days or weeks. By consolidating all its data with a third-party data storage specialist, the firm has made space for future growth, and can non-disruptively upgrade its storage systems easily in the future without having to take down its storage infrastructure — another form of business resilience.
  • Reducing its carbon footprints: The firm turned off energy hungry legacy storage systems and reduced rack space by 58%, lowering energy consumption by around 35,000kWh over a year, because it had offloaded main storage needs to a third-party consolidated data platform.

According to Ramanujam Komanduri, Country Manager (India), Pure Storage (India), the third-party data consolidation and storage platform: “Data is the lifeblood for the companies in the visual effects industry like PhantomFX. Any misstep could result in damaging financial losses. Pure Storage is proud to be able to support these companies with business impactful technology solutions that provide them with a strong foundation for growth.”