KVN Productions is the powerhouse studio behind Toxic, one of the most highly anticipated and a lot of other high-budget productions in Indian cinema. With a massive scale comes an equally massive technical footprint. As post-production ramped up, the studio’s internal VFX and animation teams hit a critical infrastructure bottleneck: their storage solution could not keep up with their high-fidelity asset pipeline.
To resolve this, Mr.Bharadwaj, the VFX Supervisor at KVN Productions, reached out to the engineering team at theMVP to design a bespoke centralized storage server capable of handling their intensive, real-time collaboration requirements.
The Challenge: Eliminating Concurrent Pipeline Bottlenecks
A modern VFX studio operates with multiple parallel departments including FX, lighting, and compositing. Each department imposes a distinct load on the network:
“It varies from department to department. FX and lighting need more machine power. Compositing also varies-if they’re working on a deep comp or 3D comp, they’ll require higher machine power.” – Mr.Bharadwaj, VFX Supervisor, KVN Productions
The studio needed to connect 15 high-end artist workstations to a single shared storage pool simultaneously. Off-the-shelf Network Attached Storage (NAS) units typically feature lower-tier 2- or 4-core processors. In a high-throughput studio environment, these pre-built solutions cause severe latency, making it impossible to live-edit heavy video assets directly off the server.
Without a specialized configuration, artists spent critical hours manually transferring large project files back and forth locally, stalling project velocity.
The Solution: A Hardware-Accelerated Storage Architecture
Then we built a custom 3U rackmount storage server tailored precisely to KVN Productions’ workflow, prioritizing data availability, high compute overhead, and massive network bandwidth.
Dedicated Processing Power
Instead of standard low-power embedded chips, the server is anchored by an Intel Xeon Gold 5318Y processor sporting 24 cores and 48 threads. This substantial core count ensures the server can handle complex input/output (I/O) requests from 15 high-throughput users simultaneously without bottlenecking.
Hardware RAID 5 for Maximum Safety and Throughput
For the storage pool, we integrated eight 16TB Enterprise SATA drives, providing 128TB of raw storage. The array is configured in RAID 5, yielding roughly 116TB of usable capacity while offering single-drive fault tolerance.
Meaning even If a drive fails, no data is lost and the dead drive is immediately hot-swapped, and the drive rebuilds automatically.
To prevent array management from choking the CPU, a dedicated LSI 3108 Hardware RAID Controller with 1GB of onboard cache was added. By offloading parity calculations to dedicated hardware, the Xeon processor remains fully available to route data to the artists.
Eliminating the Network Bottleneck
To ensure seamless live-editing, the server utilizes an Intel X710-DA2 Dual-port 10GbE Network Card alongside the motherboard’s native dual 10GbE ports. This architecture provides up to ten times the bandwidth of standard office networking, allowing multiple editors to pull uncompressed 3D comps and heavy FX layers concurrently without lag.
System Hardware Configuration
The final build specifications selected for KVN Productions include:
- CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 5318Y (24C/48T)
- Motherboard: ASRockRack SPC621D8-2L2T
- Memory: 64GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM
- Boot Drive: 500GB M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD
- Storage Pool: 8x 16TB Enterprise SAS/SATA (128TB Raw)
- RAID Controller: LSI 3108 Hardware RAID (1GB Cache)
- Networking: Intel X710-DA2 Dual-port 10GbE
- Chassis & Power: 3U 16-Bay Rackmount + 1200W Redundant PSU
The Result & Customer Experience
By moving away from rigid OEM offerings and investing in a custom-engineered server architecture, KVN Productions successfully optimized its post-production pipeline. Artists can now edit, render, and composite directly from the centralized storage array, completely removing file-management downtime from their daily schedule.
Reflecting on the collaborative process, Mr.Bharadwaj noted the ease of building a specialized system outside of rigid corporate standard configurations:
“I spoke to the team, and they were very helpful. They just understood our requirements and came up with some really nice suggestions. I’ve already suggested them to three to four other industry members.” – Mr.Bharadwaj, VFX Supervisor, KVN Productions
At theMVP, we specialize in engineering custom, high-performance workstations and servers tailored precisely to the demands of professional and creative workflows and if you have any compute requirements feel free to give us a call on our toll free number 1800 309 2944 or visit us at themvp.in.
