HITS

With studios and production houses increasingly shifting to cloud-based workflows, producers have come to realize the true costs of doing business in the cloud: dollars and latency, according to industry experts who spoke May 19 during the Cloud + Architecture panel breakout session “Analyze Your Move to the Cloud, It’s Still an On-Prem Play” at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS).

Challenges including public vs. private clouds and how to best support low-latency, high-throughput processes have already been addressed. The solution: edge data/cloud hybrids.

Meanwhile, Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) Carts are micro data centers supporting many processes, including real-time visual effects, video assist and collaboration, and camera to the cloud workflows.

Those workflows continues to depend on low-latency and ever-increasing processing demands before any data reaches a public cloud provider. As a result, on-prem infrastructure gains more importance than ever, not less.

During the HITS session, panelists discussed the functionality of on-premises infrastructure, as well as the role and responsibility facilities have in knowing when to get their clients’ data to the cloud or on to a local private cloud.

The ecosphere of virtual production doesn’t work in a legacy cloud and the panelists described the value of a hybrid edge data/hyperscale data center solution, the two working in concert together, each doing what they do best in support of the process.

 On-Prem’s Alive and Well

“I keep hearing, especially even at NAB, that everything’s going to the cloud; on-prem is dead,” panel moderator Sean Tajkowski, technical director of the Media and Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), said at the start of the session.

But he told attendees: “I want to know how we’re actually going to get this content out of the studios if on-prem’s dead and move into the cloud. There’s still an on-prem play and it’s extremely, extremely important to the reliability of that content getting to the cloud.”

Additionally, he said, there are “some things that are developing, especially in virtual production, which I look forward to hearing a bunch of stuff [about] in regards to some latency issues and other real-time processing issues with rendering and other tremendous amounts of data that’s being acquired locally at the stage – not just camera to the cloud.”

He added: “Today we’re going to go into quite a few of the solutions and also some very interesting topics that come from the big data world that entertainment is just now adopting.”

Just as a reminder of how quickly technology has been moving in recent years, he pointed out: “Seven years ago, we weren’t even talking about cloud.”

Noting that he served for 21 years in the U.S. Navy, Tony Grayson, GM, quantum, at Compass Datacenters, said his “life goal was to command my own submarine and I did that.”

However, he noted: “Unfortunately, I spent about 80 percent of my time at sea. And so I got out of the Navy and went to work for Facebook, [where] I kind of realized that I kind of knew how cloud worked.”

About one year ago, he was looking to get out of that side of the business and jumped to the supplier side of the sector when he joined Compass Datacenters as part of its new quantum business line, he recalled.

“The whole basis of quantum really is the future really is going to be data and the terabytes, in which case it becomes very centric to everything,” he said, noting: “You might’ve heard their term is data gravity. And so what quantum really is poised to do is bring the physical infrastructure to wherever you kind of need it. And we make it as a full service where we find the land, we provide the engineering and the manufacturing. We do the permitting and we deploy the … small modular data center wherever you need it.”

Going this route yields several benefits, he said, including: “You don’t have to worry about your physical infrastructure. We make it super simple.” It is an operating expense (OpEx) model rather than a capital expenditure (CapEx) “play,” he said, adding: “Wherever you need it, we can put it….  You can put your” high performance computing (HPC) inside, along with your storage and “we can run that on-prem for you.”

His company “made a big push with kind of going from the ground up on the design,” which is sustainable, he said, explaining that the “carbon footprint of each one of our modules [uses] a lot less steel than most data centers that are out there.” As a result, it requires “much less energy to make” and there are also “other options for backup,” he said. “We’re not using diesels,” which he noted are ”especially problematic here in California.”

In addition, he said, “the whole thing is remotely managed [and] you can actually get alerts from your data center on your phone and you can manage your data center remotely too.”

Data Centers are the ‘Future’

“Everyone talks edge and everyone has a different definition of edge,” according to  Grayson. “And that definition usually goes with whatever product you’re trying to push,” he said. “But as a physical infrastructure person, I don’t care what the definition of edge is. I just know that the future is going to be data centers everywhere, whether it’s” the Internet of Things (IoT), whether it’s streaming or gaming – “everyone’s going to need some form of data center everywhere.”

Despite that, he conceded: “I’m not saying the cloud is going away.” What he was instead arguing was that “you’re going to have this migration from the cloud to on-prem and everything in between,” he said.

We will see that with “autonomous cities, autonomous cars, IoT, you name it,” he predicted, adding: “We have to be able to provide that capability to put a data center where a customer needs it, whether it’s a security play [or] whether it’s a latency play.” Or “whether they want to go hug their servers or anything,” he joked.

Cause for Concern?

However, Tajkowski told attendees: “I’m greatly concerned because we’re not focusing enough on our studios [and] our production workflow in infrastructure. I see it time and time again, going to facilities [and] looking at what we call user- induced error. We keep pointing to software. We keep upping bandwidth. We keep doing all these things. But we’re not paying attention to the foundation layer of our business, which is getting to the cloud.”

Agreeing that challenges remain, Jason Bautista, solutions architect, enterprise strategy and technology at CommScope, pointed out: “You can have the greatest car. But if the road that you’re driving on is bumpy and it has not been smoothed out, or you [haven’t] maintained that road, you’re going to run into errors. You’re in a damaged payload in your car. And that’s the thing where we [have] to kind of think about where we start.”

Bautista added that one thing we need to all “understand is that modern networks are complex.”

To view the entire presentation, click here.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), presented by ICVR and sponsored by Genpact, MicroStrategy, Whip Media, Convergent Risks, Perforce, Richey May Technology Solutions, Signiant, Softtek, Bluescape, Databricks, KeyCode Media, Metal Toad, Shift, Zendesk, EIDR, Fortinet, Arch Platform Technologies and Amazon Studios.