Sohonet Selects IBM’s Cloud to Meet Demands of Film Industry Customers
Sohonet customers gain access to SoftLayer’s on-demand compute and storage for render farms and media transcoding
Global data management company Sohonet has announced that it is offering IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platform to its extensive network of film and media companies specialicing in post production, (VFX) visual effects, and animation.
Sohonet’s customers can now directly access SoftLayer’s highly customisable and scalable cloud computing resources, available via a growing global data center network.
Sohonet’s wide customer base includes leading British film studios, global media companies, and film and television productions. With SoftLayer, Sohonet addresses the challenges of moving huge digital media files through the production and post-production pipeline by offering scalable cloud computing environments to manage and store that data.
It’s desirable for media companies to “buy in” cloud rendering
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 IBM Cloud, Sohonet’s customers can easily 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.
Additionally, Sohonet customers have the benefits of hosting 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.
Further, the new relationship provides Sohonet customers a competitive range of storage options, including object, block, and file type storage, which are optimised for performance, volume, backups and content delivery. All this helps media and film companies complete projects on time and on budget.
Appreciated by new customers
“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.
“IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer cloud is particularly appreciated by new customers as the company doesn’t charge for bandwidth used for file transfer between data centres and therefore 
bandwidth coming onto the SoftLayer network. With provisioning taking as little as two hours, and all services accessible through SoftLayer’s single customer portal, deployment for new customers is painless,” says Shrive.
“Functionality and operational expertise is critical to our clients’ business success,” said Chuck Parker, executive chairman of Sohonet. “This unique relationship with IBM Cloud offers our customers a low-latency, high-bandwidth private network link into the most versatile and customisable of infrastructure platforms. 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.”
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