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Hollywood Giant Drives Media Innovation and Lowers Cost with OpenStack Private Cloud
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Predictive Maintenance
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The company faced a unique IT challenge due to the massive size and intermittent needs of video post-production workloads. Media coloring, rendering, and transcoding for movies required compute and storage resources that spiked to enormous levels at irregular intervals. An increase in new server requests to meet peak utilization placed substantial strain on existing IT resources. The company needed to improve innovation, decrease time-to-market, and cut capital costs. Massive file storage needs for animation and high definition video was projected at 100X growth over 10 years. This growth could not be serviced by the current architecture. Without migrating to a centralized and shared private cloud, infrastructure costs would multiply.
About The Customer
The customer is a digital technology leader in the media and entertainment industry, specializing in animation, visual effects, 3D, and 4K. The company has grown significantly through its creativity and innovation, with recent milestones including one billion Blu-ray discs and set top boxes (STBs) shipped, and video credits for multiple Oscar winners. The company's information systems and software span over 100 offices, studios, and laboratories around the world, allowing it to stay ahead of market advancements such as mobile, streaming, and over-the-top services.
The Solution
The company created a new IT group to deliver on-demand private and public cloud services. They chose the RightScale cloud portfolio management (CPM) solution to automate and orchestrate existing and new cloud resources. For their private cloud solution, the IT team turned to the OpenStack community and were introduced to Mirantis. They committed to Mirantis OpenStack for installation of their first cloud in the western U.S. for production Windows applications. The team effectively used Mirantis training to ensure high performance and stability at this location. The company is planning to add OpenStack clouds in Europe and India for rendering and distribution of movie footage and STB development. All three OpenStack locations will be centrally managed with workloads allocated based on size, security, and cost targets.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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