Importance of High-Performance Computing in the Media and Entertainment Industry

With NAB Show 2019 wrapped up in Las Vegas, I find myself reflecting on all the amazing demonstrations and technologies that were presented throughout the week. I also think about the opportunities that I had to engage with many of our customers both in the showroom and at our reception at the Barrymore Hotel. From mind-blowing visual effects to nonstop streaming to instant access to data, one thing stands out very clearly: The need for high-performance computing (HPC) in the media and entertainment industry is greater than ever.

And NetApp® high-performance computing solutions can help you meet that need.

Meet Customers’ Growing Expectations for Media and Entertainment

In an industry that’s expected to reach more than $830 billion in revenue by 2022 (and that’s just in the United States), it’s safe to say that growth will not be slowing down any time soon. Along with this growth comes new customer expectations. Customers who once were happy with being able to simply record a show and watch it later now expect to have instant access to programming with uninterrupted streaming. Visual effects in feature films must be spotless. And, with each new film release, the effects must be even more mind-blowing.

For TV broadcasters, the pressure is really on. For example, sports fans don’t only expect to see every moment of a live game anymore. Now they also expect to see instant replays and to be given nonstop, real-time statistics about individual players and teams. In the not-so-distant future, fans will expect to see the live game and similar plays from games in the past, as well as more granular statistics instantly.

To meet customer expectations now and in the future, media and entertainment companies like yours need fast, reliable HPC solutions. These solutions must integrate with your existing tools and applications. And they must enable efficiency at all stages of your media workflows (ingest, manage, produce, process, deliver, archive, and transact). To help you keep pace with rapidly growing business while keeping costs under control, these solutions also must scale easily to grow performance and capacity as required.

NetApp HPC solutions give you the speed, integration, efficiency, and scalability that you need. With NetApp HPC solutions, you can:

• Accelerate performance with 12GBps read/write operations per controller pair.
• Gain massive sequential and random I/O that outperforms competitors in media workloads.
• Get 99.999%+ availability and industry-leading durability, based on nearly 1 million units shipped.
• Scale limitlessly with boundless containers.

How Infrastructure Advancements Enable DevOps Success

How can organizations prepare their infrastructures for the future of DevOps and IT? Matt Watts, NetApp’s data strategist and director of technology, recently sat down for a discussion with colleagues Nancy Hart, head of marketing for Cloud Infrastructure, and Robert Stumpf, senior director of IT for Enterprise Solutions Delivery, to find out. Here are three key takeaways from their conversation.

DevOps Is a Process and a Culture

Keeping up with the speed of innovation is now more difficult than ever. Five-year roadmaps, once ubiquitous, have been replaced by three-year roadmaps, which are quickly becoming obsolete. As Hart noted, “speed is the new scale,” and organizations have to move quickly to provide new services and revenue streams before their competitors do. According to Stumpf, “It’s about the way you react [to new changes] that’s the new operating model.”

Organizations that are up to the challenge need to think differently about infrastructure and break the barriers between developers and operations. “DevOps is not a thing. It’s not a person. It’s not even a product. DevOps is a process and a culture,” said Hart. It’s not a future state; it’s happening now. Organizations that embrace DevOps have to learn new roles, set new expectations, and adopt a new pace.

A common misconception is that this change only needs to happen at the enterprise level, in big IT, or in traditional shops. “There are new foundational technologies just over the horizon that will hit every part of our economy,” Hart said. “Things like the Internet of Things and associated AI and ML. There’s blockchain and what blockchain can do for a trusted supply chain…. That supply chain could be your milk, or it could be the fruit that you buy.” New opportunities will come with new data sources that organizations of every size in every sector will need to balance.

Stumpf expressed enthusiasm about the ability to rapidly deliver capabilities that will provide business value and make decisions quicker. “I’m excited about the things that I don’t know are coming. That is an interesting role to be in.”

Rebalance Operations After Moving to the Cloud

After rushing to the cloud, some organizations found it wasn’t the right fit for many of their legacy applications. They didn’t work correctly or couldn’t be transferred and ultimately, organizations found themselves needing to bring many applications back on premises that were not built for cloud.

Now, infrastructure teams are shrinking and application-build teams are expanding. According to Stumpf, it’s imperative that organizations invest in developing microservices around their legacy applications, to mask the legacy components and create services that advance their businesses. They also need to adopt a forward-thinking mindset. To illustrate this, Watts shared a story about speaking to a client who, after learning about the NetApp Data Fabric and the potential for delivering a hybrid multi-cloud experience, declared, “I’m no longer a storage admin. Going forward, I’m a data fabric architect.”

Understanding the new DevOps landscape is a good first step, but it’s important to act quickly. Organizations need to be agile enough to say no to previously made investments, and instead invest in future-proofing their DevOps culture by moving toward a hybrid multi-cloud experience. “I have yet to meet a customer who feels like they’ve got DevOps right,” said Hart. Watts replied, “It’s a process of continuous improvement; if you think you’ve actually got it right, then maybe you didn’t set the bar high enough in terms of what it is that you wanted to achieve.”

Deliver a Hybrid Multi-cloud Experience

In this era of services and microservices, organizations struggle to take advantage of innovations seamlessly. They want to use hyperscalers as well as the bespoke services they’ve built in their data centers to offer new revenue opportunities and quickly respond to competitor challenges. Hart says they can when they deliver a hybrid multi-cloud experience.

A hybrid multi-cloud experience, delivered through the NetApp Data Fabric and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure (HCI), allows an organization to provide an experience based on frictionless consumption, self-service, automation, programmable APIs, and infrastructure independence. And it allows them to deploy hybrid cloud services between traditional and new applications, and between data centers and public clouds quickly and efficiently. It’s not an either-or scenario. The hybrid multi-cloud experience allows organizations to leverage all available technologies, including new innovations and traditional legacy applications, to advance business goals and drive success.