Global data management company Sohonet has selected IBM SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform to address the demands from its customers in media and film industry.
Sohonet will offer IBM platform to its extensive network of film and media companies specializing in post production, visual effects (VFX), and animation.
Film rendering has always been compute intensive, but the increased scale of studio film production and the ability to service concurrent projects has made it increasingly desirable for media companies to “buy in” cloud rendering when extra capacity is needed.
With SoftLayer, clients can easily move huge digital media files through the production and post-production pipeline by offering scalable cloud computing environments to manage and store that data.
Customers can also scale their infrastructure based on immediate workflow needs. They can quickly spin up a mix of virtual and bare metal servers on demand and configure them as if they were their own on-premises servers.
Another advantage is that customers can host multiple Web servers on a single physical server coupled with the necessary processing capability of dedicated machines, a key requirement for high I/O (input/output) workloads like film rendering.
The service also provides Sohonet customers with a number of storage options, including object, block, and file type storage, which are optimized for performance, volume, backups and content delivery.
“Just as more and more businesses take advantage of cloud services, studios and production houses are equally taking advantage of scaling computing resources on demand, avoiding extra capital expenditure for resources they may only need for a few weeks,” said Benjamin Shrive, enterprise sales manager at SoftLayer.
SoftLayer has been an attractive option for clients because the software doesn’t charge for bandwidth used for file transfer between datacenters or therefore bandwidth coming onto the SoftLayer network, Shrive added.
According to Chuck Parker, executive chairman of Sohonet, the SoftLayer infrastructure offers the flexibility to design your environment the way you know it works best, aligning operational expenditure with incoming revenue. This allows creative teams to experiment without overinvesting on premise for peak workloads.
Rajani Baburajan
