The customer:
A world leader in computer graphics technology
Chaos Group creates powerful rendering and simulation technology. It helps artists and designers create photoreal imagery and animation for design, television, and feature films. Its physically-based rendering and simulation software is used daily by top design studios, architectural firms, advertising agencies, and visual effects companies around the globe.
V-Ray, its award-winning production renderer, is the industry standard for these kinds of companies, and has been used to create blockbuster effects for more than 150 feature films. Chaos Group counts 95 of the top 100 architectural companies and practices in the world as its clients.
The challenge:
Controlling costs with large downloads
With more than 100,000 V-Ray users around the world in high-pressure industries such as design, TV, and film, it’s essential that Chaos Group can deliver downloads quickly and reliably. These software assets and builds are extremely large – its material library, for example, is around 8GB – and the company’s users need easy, hassle-free access to these files. At the same time, Chaos Group needs to be able to control its budgets and scale up download traffic without costs becoming unrealistic.
“We launched a new product in the earlier part of 2020 and we knew that downloads would increase by about four or five times,” comments Krasimir Nachev, Team Lead DevOps/SysAdmin at Chaos Group. “We needed to find a partner that could help us deliver these large assets reliably and cost-effectively, and has the global reach to serve our customers worldwide.”
The solution:
A scalable, high-quality CDN
Following a successful trial period, Lumen now delivers Chaos Group’s assets to its customers around the world over a high-quality global Content Delivery Network (CDN). This high-capacity, high-availability, and low latency CDN has points of presence on six continents, allowing for rapid delivery even when the downloads are very large.
The benefits:
Robust, scalable and cost-effective content delivery
“As a leader in our market with customers around the globe, the worldwide speed, quality, and reliability of the Lumen CDN has been very important to us,” says Krasimir Nachev. “The CDN allows us to serve content to our end users easily and to provide them with a great experience. We also liked the API, and found it very easy to integrate with our services.”
“At the same time, with Lumen, our costs don’t spiral out of control as downloads increase. We’ve actually reduced the cost of distributing our software builds by around seven to eight times.”
Support has been another positive factor for Chaos Group. “Network problems or downtime would be a real headache for us, so responsive support is important,” says Krasimir Nachev.
“Support from Lumen is great. The team responds very quickly and has good technical skills – they really know what they’re doing. We are extremely happy with Lumen and we look forward to developing our relationship further.”
