“Due to steadily rising image resolutions, rendering is requiring more and more computing horsepower. Also the limitations of power, space and cooling for in-house render farms means they are increasingly more expensive and complex to run,” explained Mukesh Bavisi, Managing Director at Exponential-e. “Exponential-e’s unique collaboration with Microsoft Azure solves the headache of restricted resource on maxed out internal render nodes. It provides an on-demand, scalable solution that enables seamless hybrid integration of on premise resource privately connected to the raw compute power. The service is managed as one environment via a single self-service pane of glass.”
This point and click solution is achieved by combining Exponential-e’s high-speed, secure network with the Hyper-scale public cloud of Azure, and will provide private rendering capabilities that can be matched to project delivery timescales and spend.
The solution will be delivered over Exponential-e’s wholly-owned, 100 gig-Ethernet network, through private or hybrid Local Area Networks (LANs) that connect the customer’s on premise data to the raw compute power offered by Azure.
“Render-as-a-Service will alleviate the key pain point for businesses that utilise render processing across the globe,” concludes Bavisi. “Marrying our network with the Microsoft Azure cloud means greater rendering efficiencies than ever before, and provides us with the opportunity to take this solution to new sectors. By alleviating a key challenge in rendering, our customers can instead focus on driving innovation in an increasingly competitive landscape.”
The RaaS solution, currently in beta testing, will enable organisations to bid competitively for larger projects that have bigger batch compute requirements. BAFTA-award winning, visual effects (VFX) studio, Jellyfish Pictures is already utilising RaaS to flexibly scale resources on demand and significantly reduce production times, streamlining its entire business model.
“Rendering is a resource intensive workload ideally suited to Azure’s enterprise-grade, hyper-scale infrastructure,” said Nicole Herskowitz, senior director of product marketing, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp. “We’re excited to work with Exponential-e to enable a hybrid rendering solution that provides flexibility for customers in this emerging market.”
The express route provided by Exponential-e’s network is ideally suited to provide the secure connectivity through which Azure resources may be consumed for rendering. This improves the way that organisations manipulate high graphical content to manage their workload and costs. Quicker render times will result in faster and simplified processes for production changes and creative flexibility.
