Like so many other industries, Hollywood studies have begun to turn to “the cloud” to solve their computational problems. That magical, mystical place where thousands of cores wait to do your bidding, and you don’t have to worry at all about the maintenance or upkeep of them. A short piece at DataCenterKnowledge talks about some of the bigger entries into Cloud rendering this year (Pixar’s Toy STory 3, Dreamworks How To Train your Dragon, etc).
Like DreamWorks turning to HP, Hollywood needs quick access to massive amounts of compute power, yet only for the time it takes to produce the effects or movie, and then they don’t want to be stuck with data center that powered the film. The notion of cloud computing with access to the vast resources of servers, processing power and storage is thus an attractive proposition. “Our strategy going forward is to push as much as we can into the cloud,” says Darcy Antonellis, president of technical operations for Warner Bros. “When you can scale up or scale back so easily, that’s a big economic advantage.”
This is probably the biggest thing most companies see when they think cloud: I can get the effective power of a supercomputer, without having to pay IT to manage it or the Power Bill to keep it running!
Of course, they forget all of the typical networking, security, and software issues that come with it. But those are slowly being whittled away as more and more companies (both users and vendors) embrace the idea.
via Hollywood’s Render Farms Move to the Cloud « Data Center Knowledge.
