Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/426320
20 cgw n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 4 weren't developing content on local machines at all, but on machines up in that cloud in the first place? That's precisely where the third – the most disruptive –cloud model comes into play: the Graphics Desktop Hosting Cloud. In today's conventional work- station- and PC-centric envi- ronments, everything is local to the desktop: the visual content, the rendering of that content, and the resulting pixel stream that shows up on the user's display. But in the cloud-hosted model, the user's virtual machine – the content, the processing, and the storage – resides in a server somewhere, in the studio's data center, for example, or outsourced to a cloud provider. In the last couple of years, leading IT vendors, including Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Teradici, HP, and Dell, have bootstrapped the technology to make that high-performance graphics workstation-in-the-cloud a reality. Rework an animation sequence, tweak a texture, and re-render. Now go review that updated sequence with a colleague or director who doesn't happen to be sitting in the next office. With a con- ventional deskside workstation approach, that would likely mean a lengthy delay copying over the network to some- where, or perhaps a shorter delay but with a compromise in quality. With a cloud-hosted virtual workstation, however, the source data is modified in place, in the cloud, ready to stream to wherever needed. T H E N E T W O R K : A M A K E O R B R E A K No doubt, studios like Jellyfish (see "A Case Study: Jellyfish Studios," this page) are at the A CASE STUDY: JELLYFISH STUDIOS The dramatic improvement in the performance and benefits of cloud-hosted desktops hasn't been lost on those at the forefront of digital media production. Studios and effects houses have been bumping into problems of unwieldy data sets, physically scattered staff, and security issues for years. Emerging cloud and data center solutions have found a welcome audience with this group, including Jelllyfish Studios. For several years, the London-based media company (Line of Duty, Dr. Who: Day of the Doctor) had found the provisioning and support of the traditional IT environment – built around client-side PC and worksta- tions – increasingly prob- lematic. Upon starting a pro- duction, the company would have to buy and configure all the machines necessary to support employees and ex- ternal contractors through all the peaks and valleys of a modern DME workflow. That's tough enough for a company that can predict- ably amortize the invest- ment. But a production house like Jellyfish might have to ramp up on a big project on a short schedule, with no guar- antees all that investment will be leveraged once the project has been completed. Now, factor in that big data problem virtually all creators are now facing. Jellyfish archives a once-in- conceivable 300 tb of cur- rent and archived content. Storing that on dedicat- ed servers with subsets scattered on local creators' machines is a storage and bandwidth burden; keeping it up-to-date is daunting. A year and a half ago, Jellyfish CTO Jeremy Smith planted the seeds for an eventual migration away from deskbound machines to those that are virtualized and cloud-hosted across its dual-site enterprise. Smith approached UK cloud provider Exponential-e about bringing its DaaS-GPU (Desk- top-as-a-Service for Graphic Processing Units) to Jellyfish, along with a high-perfor- mance network to run it on. Built on a foundation of Nvidia's GRID technology and VMware's Horizon DaaS cloud-hosting soware, DaaS-GPU gives Jellyfish a pool of cloud-accessible, GPU-powered servers from which to host a flexible and dynamic number of virtual high-performance graphics machines. Each user gets a desktop client machine that can drive two full-HD (1920x1080) screens capa- ble of displaying downscaled 4 k content as necessary. And that massive 300tb of company data? It's now all stored in the same cloud, accessible by all contribu- tors – anywhere, anytime. With workstations served up from the cloud, projects now ramp up and down with minimal delay. Jellyfish can quickly wind down one contractor and provision an- other. By tapping a dynamic pool of virtual machines that rise and fall with head count, IT budgets aren't wasted on hardware that isn't being used effectively, or even used at all. The number of deployed virtual workstations is dy- namic and configurable, as are the capabilities of each machine, which can be dialed to the user. For example, the IT manager can set an animator's machine to deliver a guaranteed frame rate first, skimping on image quality if throughput is constrained. Conversely, the machine for a texture painter working in The Foundry's Mari can be tuned for max- imum image fidelity at the possible sacrifice of frame rate. – Alex Herrera WITH WORKSTATIONS SERVED UP FROM THE CLOUD, PROJECTS NOW RAMP UP AND DOWN WITH MINIMAL DELAY.