Kennedy Miller Mitchell (KMM), the renowned Australian media production house behind the action film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, has made the switch from HPE to Dell hardware, specifically PowerScale NAS arrays. This change comes as KMM embraces generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to pre-visualise movie scenes before filming, aiming to increase productivity in filmmaking.
Before starting work on Furiosa, KMM replaced all its HPE infrastructure with Dell storage arrays, workstations, monitors, and switches. The decision to go with Dell was influenced by the need for hardware that could support GenAI, vital for KMM’s pre-visualisation process. Yan Chen, KMM’s chief information officer, explained that they now direct and edit films in 3D before shooting, allowing them to evaluate scenes in advance and optimize the shooting process.
The use of PowerScale NAS arrays has enabled KMM to process the massive 20PB of data required for Furiosa, with plans to transition to AI servers in the future. Dell Precision workstations equipped with Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 cards support KMM’s generative AI work, accelerating production stages from start to finish. The high availability and fast storage I/O offered by PowerScale were key factors in the decision to switch from HPE.
Chen highlighted the significant investment made in the IT migration, supported by a substantial budget for Furiosa. Looking ahead, KMM plans to invest in servers equipped with the latest GPUs to further enhance their generative AI infrastructure. Chen believes this technology represents an industrial revolution in cinema, potentially increasing film production significantly in the future.