DreamWorks Animation Crafts its Next Era of Dynamic IT Infrastructure

Transcript of a discussion on how an innovative entertainment company leads the charge for multi-purpose IT-as-a-service capabilities. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.

Our next thought leader interview examines how DreamWorks Animation is building a multipurpose, all-inclusive, and agile data center capability. We’ll now learn why a new era of responsive and dynamic IT infrastructure is demanded, and how one high-performance digital manufacturing leader aims to get there sooner rather than later.

Here to describe how an entertainment industry innovator leads the charge for bleeding-edge IT-as-a-service capabilities is Jeff Wike, CTO of DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, California. Welcome, Jeff.

Wike

Jeff Wike: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: Tell us why the older way of doing IT infrastructure and hosting apps and data just doesn't cut it anymore. What has made that run out of gas?

Wike: You have to continue to improve things. We are in a world where technology is advancing at an unbelievable pace. The amount of data, the capability of the hardware, the intelligence of the infrastructure are coming. In order for any business to stay ahead of the curve -- to really drive value into the business – it has to continue to innovate.

Gardner: IT has become more pervasive in what we do. I have heard you all refer to yourselves as digital manufacturing. Are the demands of your industry also a factor in making it difficult for IT to keep up?

Wike: When I say we are a digital manufacturer, it’s because we are a place that manufacturers content, whether it's animated films or TV shows; that content is all made on the computer. An artist sits in front of a workstation or a monitor, and is basically building these digital assets that we put through simulations and rendering so in the end it comes together to produce a movie.

That's all about manufacturing, and we actually have a pipeline, but it's really like an assembly line. I was looking at a slide today about Henry Ford coming up with the first assembly line; it's exactly what we are doing, except instead of adding a car part, we are adding a character, we’re adding a hair to a character, we’re adding clothes, we’re adding an environment, and we’re putting things into that environment.

We are manufacturing that image, that story, in a linear way, but also in an iterative way. We are constantly adding more details as we embark on that process of three to four years to create one animated film.

Gardner: Well, it also seems that we are now taking that analogy of the manufacturing assembly line to a higher plane, because you want to have an assembly line that doesn't just make cars -- it can make cars and trains and submarines and helicopters, but you don't have to change the assembly line, you have to adjust and you have to utilize it properly.

So it seems to me that we are at perhaps a cusp in IT where the agility of the infrastructure and its responsiveness to your workloads and demands is better than ever.

Greater creativity, increased efficiency

Wike: That's true. If you think about this animation process or any digital manufacturing process, one issue that you have to account for is legacy workflows, legacy software, and legacy data formats -- all these things are inhibitors to innovation. There are a lot of tools. We actually write our own software, and we’re very involved in projects related to computer science at the studio.

We’ll ask ourselves, “How do you innovate? How can you change your environment to be able to move forward and innovate and still carry around some of those legacy systems?”

How HPE Synergy

Automates

Infrastructure Operations

And one of the things we’ve done over the past couple of years is start to re-architect all of our software tools in order to take advantage of massive multi-core processing to try to give artists interactivity into their creative process. It’s about iterations. How many things can I show a director, how quickly can I create the scene to get it approved so that I can hand it off to the next person, because there's two things that you get out of that.

One, you can explore more and you can add more creativity. Two, you can drive efficiency, because it's all about how much time, how many people are working on a particular project and how long does it take, all of which drives up the costs. So you now have these choices where you can add more creativity or -- because of the compute infrastructure -- you can drive efficiency into the operation.

So where does the infrastructure fit into that, because we talk about tools and the ability to make those tools quicker, faster, more real-time? We conducted a project where we tried to create a middleware layer between running applications and the hardware, so that we can start to do data abstraction. We can get more mobile as to where the data is, where the processing is, and what the systems underneath it all are. Until we could separate the applications through that layer, we weren’t really able to do anything down at the core.

Core flexibility, fast

We want to be able to change how we are using that infrastructure -- examine usage patterns, the workflows -- and be able to optimize.

Now that we have done that, we are attacking the core. When we look at our ability to replace that with new compute, and add the new templates with all the security in it -- we want that in our infrastructure. We want to be able to change how we are using that infrastructure -- examine usage patterns, the workflows -- and be able to optimize.

Before, if we wanted to do a new project, we’d say, “Well, we know that this project takes x amount of infrastructure. So if we want to add a project, we need 2x,” and that makes a lot of sense. So we would build to peak. If at some point in the last six months of a show, we are going to need 30,000 cores to be able to finish it in six months, we say, “Well, we better have 30,000 cores available, even though there might be times when we are only using 12,000 cores.” So we were buying to peak, and that’s wasteful.

What we wanted was to be able to take advantage of those valleys, if you will, as an opportunity -- the opportunity to do other types of projects. But because our infrastructure was so homogeneous, we really didn't have the ability to do a different type of project. We could create another movie if it was very much the same as a previous film from an infrastructure-usage standpoint.

By now having composable, or software-defined infrastructure, and being able to understand what the requirements are for those particular projects, we can recompose our infrastructure -- parts of it or all of it -- and we can vary that. We can horizontally scale and redefine it to get maximum use of our infrastructure -- and do it quickly.

Gardner: It sounds like you have an assembly line that’s very agile, able to do different things without ripping and replacing the whole thing. It also sounds like you gain infrastructure agility to allow your business leaders to make decisions such as bringing in new types of businesses. And in IT, you will be responsive, able to put in the apps, manage those peaks and troughs.

Does having that agility not only give you the ability to make more and better movies with higher utilization, but also gives perhaps more wings to your leaders to go and find the right business models for the future?

Wike: That’s absolutely true. We certainly don't want to ever have a reason to turn down some exciting project because our digital infrastructure can’t support it. I would feel really bad if that were the case.

In fact, that was the case at one time, way back when we produced Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Because it was such a big movie from a consumer products standpoint, we were asked to make another movie for direct-to-video. But we couldn't do it; we just didn’t have the capacity, so we had to just say, “No.” We turned away a project because we weren’t capable of doing it. The time it would take us to spin up a project like that would have been six months.

The world is great for us today, because people want content -- they want to consume it on their phone, on their laptop, on the side of buildings and in theaters. People are looking for more content everywhere.

Yet projects for varied content platforms require different amounts of compute and infrastructure, so we want to be able to create content quickly and avoid building to peak, which is too expensive. We want to be able to be flexible with infrastructure in order to take advantage of those opportunities.

HPE Synergy

Automates

Infrastructure Operations

Gardner: How is the agility in your infrastructure helping you reach the right creative balance? I suppose it’s similar to what we did 30 years ago with simultaneous engineering, where we would design a physical product for manufacturing, knowing that if it didn't work on the factory floor, then what's the point of the design? Are we doing that with digital manufacturing now?

Artifact analytics improve usage, rendering

We always look at budgets, and budgets can be money budgets, they can be rendering budgets, they can be storage budgets, and networking -- all of those things are commodities that are required to create a project. 

Wike: It’s interesting that you mention that. We always look at budgets, and budgets can be money budgets, it can be rendering budgets, it can be storage budgets, and networking -- I mean all of those things are commodities that are required to create a project.

Artists, managers, production managers, directors, and producers are all really good at managing those projects if they understand what the commodity is. Years ago we used to complain about disk space: “You guys are using too much disk space.” And our production department would say, “Well, give me a tool to help me manage my disk space, and then I can clean it up. Don’t just tell me it's too much.”

One of the initiatives that we have incorporated in recent years is in the area of data analytics. We re-architected our software and we decided we would re-instrument everything. So we started collecting artifacts about rendering and usage. Every night we ran every digital asset that had been created through our rendering, and we also collected analytics about it. We now collect 1.2 billion artifacts a night.

And we correlate that information to a specific asset, such as a character, basket, or chair -- whatever it is that I am rendering -- as well as where it’s located, which shot it’s in, which sequence it’s in, and which characters are connected to it. So, when an artist wants to render a particular shot, we know what digital resources are required to be able to do that.

One of the things that’s wasteful of digital resources is either having a job that doesn't fit the allocation that you assign to it, or not knowing when a job is complete. Some of these rendering jobs and simulations will take hours and hours -- it could take 10 hours to run.

At what point is it stuck? At what point do you kill that job and restart it because something got wedged and it was a dependency? And you don't really know, you are just watching it run. Do I pull the plug now? Is it two minutes away from finishing, or is it never going to finish?

Just the facts

Before, an artist would go in every night and conduct a test render. And they would say, “I think this is going to take this much memory, and I think it's going to take this long.” And then we would add a margin of error, because people are not great judges, as opposed to a computer. This is where we talk about going from feeling to facts.

So now we don't have artists do that anymore, because we are collecting all that information every night. We have machine learning that then goes in and determines requirements. Even though a certain shot has never been run before, it is very similar to another previous shot, and so we can predict what it is going to need to run.

By doing that machine learning and taking the guesswork out of the allocation of resources, we were able to save 15 percent of our render time, which is huge.

Now, if a job is stuck, we can kill it with confidence. By doing that machine learning and taking the guesswork out of the allocation of resources, we were able to save 15 percent of our render time, which is huge.

I recently listened to a gentleman talk about what a difference of 1 percent improvement would be. So 15 percent is huge, that's 15 percent less money you have to spend. It's 15 percent faster time for a director to be able to see something. It's 15 percent more iterations. So that was really huge for us.

Gardner: It sounds like you are in the digital manufacturing equivalent of working smarter and not harder. With more intelligence, you can free up the art, because you have nailed the science when it comes to creating something.

Creative intelligence at the edge

Wike: It's interesting; we talk about intelligence at the edge and the Internet of Things (IoT), and that sort of thing. In my world, the edge is actually an artist. If we can take intelligence about their work, the computational requirements that they have, and if we can push that data -- that intelligence -- to an artist, then they are actually really, really good at managing their own work.

It's only a problem when they don't have any idea that six months from now it's going to cause a huge increase in memory usage or render time. When they don't know that, it's hard for them to be able to self-manage. But now we have artists who can access Tableau reports everyday and see exactly what the memory usage was or the compute usage of any of the assets they’ve created, and they can correct it immediately.

On Megamind, a film DreamWorks Animation released several years ago, it was prior to having the data analytics in place, and the studio encountered massive rendering spikes on certain shots. We really didn't understand why.

After the movie was complete, when we could go back and get printouts of logs to analyze, we determined that these peaks in rendering resources were caused by his watch. Whenever the main character’s watch was in a frame, the render times went up. We looked at the models, and well-intended artists had taken a model of a watch and every gear was modeled, and it was just a huge, heavy asset to render.

But it was too late to do anything about it. But now, if an artist were to create that watch today, they would quickly find out that they had really over-modeled that watch. We would then need to go in and reduce that asset down, because it's really not a key element to the story. And they can do that today, which is really great.

HPE Synergy

Automates

Infrastructure Operations

Gardner: I am a big fan of animated films, and I am so happy that my kids take me to see them because I enjoy them as much as they do. When you mention an artist at the edge, it seems to me it’s more like an army at the edge, because I wait through the end of the movie, and I look at the credits scroll -- hundreds and hundreds of people at work putting this together.

So you are dealing with not just one artist making a decision, you have an army of people. It's astounding that you can bring this level of data-driven efficiency to it.

Movie-making’s mobile workforce

If you capture information, you can find so many things that we can really understand better about our creative process to be able to drive efficiency and value into the entire business.

Wike: It becomes so much more important, too, as we become a more mobile workforce. 

Now it becomes imperative to be able to obtain the information about what those artists are doing so that they can collaborate. We know what value we are really getting from that, and so much information is available now. If you capture it, you can find so many things that we can really understand better about our creative process to be able to drive efficiency and value into the entire business.

Gardner: Before we close out, maybe a look into the crystal ball. With things like auto-scaling and composable infrastructure, where do we go next with computing infrastructure? As you say, it's now all these great screens in people's hands, handling high-definition, all the networks are able to deliver that, clearly almost an unlimited opportunity to bring entertainment to people. What can you now do with the flexible, efficient, optimized infrastructure? What should we expect?

Wike: There's an explosion in content and explosion in delivery platforms. We are exploring all kinds of different mediums. I mean, there’s really no limit to where and how one can create great imagery. The ability to do that, the ability to not say “No” to any project that comes along is going to be a great asset.

We always say that we don't know in the future how audiences are going to consume our content. We just know that we want to be able to supply that content and ensure that it’s the highest quality that we can deliver to audiences worldwide.

Gardner: It sounds like you feel confident that the infrastructure you have in place is going to be able to accommodate whatever those demands are. The art and the economics are the variables, but the infrastructure is not.

Wike: Having a software-defined environment is essential. I came from the software side; I started as a programmer, so I am coming back into my element. I really believe that now that you can compose infrastructure, you can change things with software without having to have people go in and rewire or re-stack, but instead change on-demand. And with machine learning, we’re able to learn what those demands are.

I want the computers to actually optimize and compose themselves so that I can rest knowing that my infrastructure is changing, scaling, and flexing in order to meet the demands of whatever we throw at it.

I want the computers to actually optimize and compose themselves so that I can rest knowing that my infrastructure is changing, scaling, and flexing in order to meet the demands of whatever we throw at it.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been examining how DreamWorks Animation is building a multipurpose, all-inclusive and agile data center capability for now -- and the future. And we have learned how one high-performance digital manufacturing innovator is leading the charge for bleeding edge IT-as-a-service agility.

Please join me in thanking our guest, Jeff Wike, CTO of DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, California.

Wike: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Feel free to pass this on to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how an innovative entertainment company leads the charge for multi-purpose IT-as-a-Service capabilities. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• How Imagine Communications Leverages Edge Computing for Efficient Live IP Multiscreen Digital Video
• Hybrid cloud ecosystem readies for impact from arrival of Microsoft Azure Stack
• The next line of defense—How new security leverages virtualization to counter sophisticated threats
• Advanced IoT systems provide analysis catalyst for the petrochemical refinery of the future
• India Smart Cities Mission shows IoT potential for improving quality of life at vast scale
• Converged IoT systems: Bringing the data center to the edge of everything
• Why effective IoT adoption is a team sport, and how to become a player
• How AI, IoT and blockchain will shake up procurement and supply chains
• Logicalis chief technologist defines the new ideology of hybrid IT
• TasmaNet ups its cloud game to deliver a regional digital services provider solution

How Imagine Communications Leverages Edge Computing for Efficient Live IP Multiscreen Digital Video

Transcript of a discussion on how video delivery and customization capabilities are moving to the network edge to enable end user and content provider benefits.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.

Our next high-performance edge-computing success story examines how a video delivery and customization capability is moving to the network edge -- and closer to consumers -- to support live, multi-screen Internet Protocol (IP) entertainment delivery.

We’ll learn how hybrid technology and new workflows for IP-delivered digital video are being re-architected -- with significant benefits to the end-user experience, as well as with new monetization values to the content providers.

With that, please join me in welcoming Glodina Connan-Lostanlen, Chief Marketing Officer at Imagine Communications in Frisco, Texas.

Connan-Lostanlen

Glodina Connan-Lostanlen: Thank you, very much.

Gardner: Let’s begin with the drivers in the market. Your organization has many major media clients. What are the pressures they are facing as they look to the new world of multi-screen video and media?

Connan-Lostanlen: The number-one concern of the media and entertainment industry is the fragmentation of their audience. We live with a model supported by advertising and subscriptions that rely primarily on linear programming, with people watching TV at home.

And guess what? Now they are watching it on the go -- on their telephones, on their iPads, on their laptops, anywhere. So they have to find the way to capture that audience, justify the value of that audience to their advertisers, and deliver video content that is relevant to them. And that means meeting consumer demand for several types of content, delivered at the very time that people want to consume it.  So it brings a whole range of technology and business challenges that our media and entertainment customers have to overcome. But addressing these challenges with new technology that increases agility and velocity to market also creates opportunities.

For example, they can now try new content. That means they can try new programs, new channels, and they don’t have to keep them forever if they don’t work. The new models create opportunities to be more creative, to focus on what they are good at, which is creating valuable content. At the same time, they have to make sure that they cater to all these different audiences that are either static or on the go.

This is a major, perhaps once-in-a-generation, level of change -- when you go to fully digital, IP delivered content.

Gardner: The media industry has faced so much change over the past 20 years, but this is a major, perhaps once-in-a-generation, level of change -- when you go to fully digital, IP-delivered content.

As you say, the audience is pulling the providers to multi-screen support, but there is also the capability now -- with the new technology on the back-end -- to have much more of a relationship with the customer, a one-to-one relationship and even customization, rather than one-to-many. Tell us about the drivers on the personalization level.

Connan-Lostanlen: That’s another big upside of the fragmentation, and the advent of IP technology -- all the way from content creation to making a program and distributing it. It gives the content creators access to the unique viewers, and the ability to really engage with them -- knowing what they like -- and then to potentially target advertising to them. The technology is there. The challenge remains about how to justify the business model, how to value the targeted advertising; there are different opinions on this, and there is also the unknown or the willingness of several generations of viewers to accept good advertising.

That is a great topic right now, and very relevant when we talk about linear advertising and dynamic ad insertion (DAI). Now we are able to -- at the very edge of the signal distribution, the video signal distribution -- insert an ad that is relevant to each viewer, because you know their preferences, you know who they are, and you know what they are watching, and so you can determine that an ad is going to be relevant to them.

But that means media and entertainment customers have to revisit the whole infrastructure. It’s not necessary rebuilding, they can put in add-ons. They don’t have to throw away what they had, but they can maintain the legacy infrastructure and add on top of it the IP-enabled infrastructure to let them take advantage of these capabilities.

Gardner: This change has happened from the web now all the way to multi-screen. With the web there was a model where you would use a content delivery network (CDN) to take the object, the media object, and place it as close to the edge as you could. What’s changed and why doesn’t that model work as well?

Connan-Lostanlen: I don’t know yet if I want to say that model doesn’t work anymore. Let’s let the CDN providers enhance their technology. But for sure, the volume of videos that we are consuming everyday is exponentially growing. That definitely creates pressure in the pipe. Our role at the front-end and the back-end is to make sure that videos are being created in different formats, with different ads, and everything else, in the most effective way so that it doesn’t put an undue strain on the pipe that is distributing the videos.

We are being pushed to innovate further on the type of workflows that we are implementing at our customers’ sites today, to make it efficient, to not leave storage at the edge and not centrally, and to do transcoding just-in-time. These are the things that are being worked on. It’s a balance between available capacity and the number of programs that you want to send across to your viewers – and how big your target market is.

Why not design the whole workflow digital-first?

The task for us on the back-end is to rethink the workflows in a much more efficient way. So, for example, this is what we call the digital-first approach, or unified distribution. Instead of planning a linear channel that goes the traditional way and then adding another infrastructure for multi-screen, on all those different platforms and then cable, and satellite, and IPTV, etc. -- why not design the whole workflow digital-first. This frees the content distributor or provider to hold off on committing to specific platforms until the video has reached the edge. And it’s there that the end-user requirements determine how they get the signal.

This is where we are going -- to see the efficiencies happen and so remove the pressure on the CDNs and other distribution mechanisms, like over-the-air.

Explore
High-Performance Computing

Solutions from HPE

Gardner: It means an intelligent edge capability, whereas we had an intelligent core up until now. We’ll also seek a hybrid capability between them, growing more sophisticated over time.

We have a whole new generation of technology for video delivery. Tell us about Imagine Communications. How do you go to market? How do you help your customers?

Education for future generations

Connan-Lostanlen: Two months ago we were in Las Vegas for our biggest tradeshow of the year, the NAB Show. At the event, our customers first wanted to understand what it takes to move to IP -- so the “how.” They understand the need to move to IP, to take advantage of the benefits that it brings. But how do they do this, while they are still navigating the traditional world?

It’s not only the “how,” it’s needing examples of best practices. So we instructed them in a panel discussion, for example, on Over the Top Technology (OTT), which is another way of saying IP-delivered, and what it takes to create a successful multi-screen service. Part of the panel explained what OTT is, so there’s a lot of education.

There is also another level of education that we have to provide, which is moving from the traditional world of serial digital interfaces (SDIs) in the broadcast industry to IP. It’s basically saying analog video signals can be moved into digital. Then not only is there a digitally sharp signal, it’s an IP stream. The whole knowledge about how to handle IP is new to our own industry, to our own engineers, to our own customers. We also have to educate on what it takes to do this properly.

One of the key things in the media and entertainment industry is that there’s a little bit of fear about IP, because no one really believed that IP could handle live signals. And you know how important live television is in this industry – real-time sports and news -- this is where the money comes from. That’s why the most expensive ads are run during the Super Bowl.

It’s essential to be able to do live with IP – it’s critical. That’s why

It's essential to be able to do live with IP -- it's critical.

we are sharing with our customers the real-life implementations that we are doing today.

We are also pushing multiple standards forward. We work with our competitors on these standards. We have set up a trade association to accelerate the standards work. We did all of that. And as we do this, it forces us to innovate in partnership with customers and bring them on board. They are part of that trade association, they are part of the proof-of-concept trials, and they are gladly sharing their experiences with others so that the transition can be accelerated.

Gardner: Imagine Communications is then a technology and solutions provider to the media content companies, and you provide the means to do this. You are also doing a lot with ad insertion, billing, in understanding more about the end-user and allowing that data flow from the edge back to the core, and then back to the edge to happen.

At the heart of it all

Connan-Lostanlen: We do everything that happens behind the camera -- from content creation all the way to making a program and distributing it. And also, to your point, on monetizing all that with a management system. We have a long history of powering all the key customers in the world for their advertising system. It’s basically an automated system that allows the selling of advertising spots, and then to bill them -- and this is the engine of where our customers make money. So we are at the heart of this.

We are in the prime position to help them take advantage of the new advertising solutions that exist today, including dynamic ad insertion. In other words, how you target ads to the single viewer. And the challenge for them is now that they have a campaign, how do they design it to cater both to the linear traditional advertising system as well as the multi-screen or web mobile application? That's what we are working on. We have a whole set of next-generation platforms that allow them to take advantage of both in a more effective manner.

Gardner: The technology is there, you are a solutions provider. You need to find the best ways of storing and crunching data, close to the edge, and optimizing networks. Tell us why you choose certain partners and what are the some of the major concerns you have when you go to the technology marketplace?

Connan-Lostanlen: One fundamental driver here, as we drive the transition to IP in this industry, is in being able to rely on consumer-off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms. But even so, not all COTS platforms are born equal, right?

For compute, for storage, for networking, you need to rely on top-scale hardware platforms, and that’s why about two years ago we started to work very closely with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for both our compute and storage technology.

Explore
High-Performance Computing
Solutions from HPE

We develop the software appliances that run on those platforms, and we sell this as a package with HPE. It’s been a key value proposition of ours as we began this journey to move to IP. We can say, by the way, our solutions run on HPE hardware. That's very important because having high-performance compute (HPC) that scales is critical to the broadcast and media industry. Having storage that is highly reliable is fundamental because going off the air is not acceptable. So it's 99.9999 percent reliable, and that’s what we want, right?

It’s a fundamental part of our message to our customers to say, “In your network, put Imagine solutions, which are powered by one of the top compute and storage technologies.”

Gardner: Another part of the change in the marketplace is this move to the edge. It’s auspicious that just as you need to have more storage and compute efficiency at the edge of the network, close to the consumer, the infrastructure providers are also designing new hardware and solutions to do just that. That's also for the Internet of Things (IoT) requirements, and there are other drivers. Nonetheless, it's an industry standard approach.

What is it about HPE Edgeline, for example, and the architecture that HPE is using, that makes that edge more powerful for your requirements? How do you view this architectural shift from core data center to the edge?

Optimize the global edge

Connan-Lostanlen: It's a big deal because we are going to be in a hybrid world. Most of our customers, when they hear about cloud, we have to explain it to them. We explain that they can have their private cloud where they can run virtualized applications on-premises, or they can take advantage of public clouds.

Being able to have a hybrid model of deployment for their applications is critical, especially for large customers who have operations in several places around the globe. For example, such big names as Disney, Turner –- they have operations everywhere. For them, being able to optimize at the edge means that you have to create an architecture that is geographically distributed -- but is highly efficient where they have those operations. This type of technology helps us deliver more value to the key customers.

Gardner: The other part of that intelligent edge technology is that it has the ability to be adaptive and customized. Each region has its own networks, its own regulation, and its own compliance, security, and privacy issues. When you can be programmatic as to how you design your edge infrastructure, then a custom-applications-orientation becomes possible.

Is there something about the edge architecture that you would like to see more of? Where do you see this going in terms of the capabilities of customization added-on to your services?

Connan-Lostanlen: One of the typical use-cases that we see for those big customers who have distributed operations is that they like to try and run their disaster recovery (DR) site in a more cost-effective manner. So the flexibility that an edge architecture provides to them is that they don’t have to rely on central operations running DR for everybody. They can do it on their own, and they can do it cost-effectively. They don't have to recreate the entire infrastructure, and so they do DR at the edge as well.

We especially see this a lot in the process of putting the pieces of the program together, what we call “play out,” before it's distributed. When you create a TV channel, if you will, it’s important to have end-to-end redundancy -- and DR is a key driver for this type of application.

Gardner: Are there some examples of your cutting-edge clients that have adopted these solutions? What are the outcomes? What are they able to do with it?

Pop-up power

Connan-Lostanlen: Well, it’s always sensitive to name those big brand names. They are very protective of their brands. However, one of the top ones in the world of media and entertainment has decided to move all of their operations -- from content creation, planning, and distribution -- to their own cloud, to their own data center.

They are at the forefront of playing live and recorded material on TV -- all from their cloud. They needed strong partners in data centers. So obviously we work with them closely, and the reason why they do this is simply to really take advantage of the flexibility. They don't want to be tied to a restricted channel count; they want to try new things. They want to try pop-up channels. For the Oscars, for example, it’s one night. Are you going to recreate the whole infrastructure if you can just check it on and off, if you will, out of their data center capacity? So that's the key application, the pop-up channels and ability to easily try new programs.

Gardner: It sounds like they are thinking of themselves as an IT company, rather than a media and entertainment company that consumes IT. Is that shift happening?

Connan-Lostanlen: Oh yes, that's an interesting topic, because I think you cannot really do this successfully if you don’t start to think IT a little bit. What we are seeing, interestingly, is that our customers typically used to have the IT department on one side, the broadcast engineers on the other side -- these were two groups that didn't speak the same language. Now they get together, and they have to, because they have to design together the solution that will make them more successful. We are seeing this happening.

I wouldn't say yet that they are IT companies. The core strength is content, that is their brand, that's what they are good at -- creating amazing content and making it available to as many people as possible.

They have to understand IT, but they can't lose concentration on their core business. I think the IT providers still have a very strong play there. It's always happening that way.

In addition to disaster recovery being a key application, multi-screen delivery is taking advantage of that technology, for sure.

Explore
High-Performance Computing
Solutions from HPE

Gardner: These companies are making this cultural shift to being much more technically oriented. They think about standard processes across all of what they do, and they have their own core data center that's dynamic, flexible, agile and cost-efficient. What does that get for them? Is it too soon, or do we have some metrics of success for companies that make this move toward a full digitally transformed organization?

Connan-Lostanlen: They are very protective about the math. It is fair to say that the up-front investments may be higher, but when you do the math over time, you do the total cost of ownership for the next 5 to 10 years -- because that’s typically the life cycle of those infrastructures – then definitely they do save money. On the operational expenditure (OPEX) side [of private cloud economics] it’s much more efficient, but they also have upside on additional revenue. So net-net, the return on investment (ROI) is much better. But it’s kind of hard to say now because we are still in the early days, but it’s bound to be a much greater ROI.

Satellite providers are thinking broadly about how this world of IP is changing their game, what they need to do differently.

Another specific DR example is in the Middle East. We have a customer there who decided to operate the DR and IP in the cloud, instead of having a replicated system with satellite links in between. They were able to save $2 million worth of satellite links, and that data center investment, trust me, was not that high. So it shows that the ROI is there.

My satellite customers might say, “Well, what are you trying to do?” The good news is that they are looking at us to help them transform their businesses, too. So big satellite providers are thinking broadly about how this world of IP is changing their game. They are examining what they need to do differently. I think it’s going to create even more opportunities to reduce costs for all of our customers.

IT enters a hybrid world

Gardner: That's one of the intrinsic values of a hybrid IT approach -- you can use many different ways to do something, and then optimize which of those methods works best, and also alternate between them for best economics. That’s a very powerful concept.

Connan-Lostanlen: The world will be a hybrid IT world, and we will take advantage of that. But, of course, that will come with some challenges. What I think is next is the number-one question that I get asked.

Three years ago costumers would ask us, “Hey, IP is not going to work for live TV.” We convinced them otherwise, and now they know it’s working, it’s happening for real.

Secondly, they are thinking, “Okay, now I get it, so how do I do this?” We showed them, this is how you do it, the education piece.

Now, this year, the number-one question is security. “Okay, this is my content, the most valuable asset I have in my company. I am not putting this in the cloud,” they say. And this is where another piece of education has to start, which is: Actually, as you put stuff on your cloud, it’s more secure.

And we are working with our technology providers. As I said earlier, the COTS providers are not equal. We take it seriously. The cyber attacks on content and media is critical, and it’s bound to happen more often.

Initially there was a lack of understanding that you need to separate your corporate network, such as emails and VPNs, from you broadcast operations network. Okay, that’s easy to explain and that can be implemented, and that's where most of the attacks over the last five years have happened. This is solved.

They are going to get right into the servers, into the storage, and try to mess with it over

Not only at the software level, but at the hardware firmware level, we are adding protection against your number-one issue, security.

there. So I think it’s super important to be able to say, “Not only at the software level, but at the hardware firmware level, we are adding protection against your number-one issue, security, which everybody can see is so important.”

However, the cyber attackers are becoming more clever, so they will overcome these initial defenses.They are going to get right into the servers, into the storage, and try to mess with it over there. So I think it’s super important to be able to say, “Not only at the software level, but at the hardware firmware level, we are adding protection against your number-one issue, security, which everybody can see is so important.”

Gardner: Sure, the next domino to fall after you have the data center concept, the implementation, the execution, even the optimization, is then to remove risk, whether it's disaster recovery, security, right down to the silicon and so forth. So that’s the next thing we will look for, and I hope I can get a chance to talk to you about how you are all lowering risk for your clients the next time we speak.

Explore
High-Performance Computing
Solutions from HPE

I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. Please join me in thanking our guest, Glodina Connan-Lostanlen, Chief Marketing Officer at Imagine Communications in Frisco, Texas.

Connan-Lostanlen: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Gardner: We have been examining how Imagine Communications is re-architecting edge and hybrid computing to enable IP delivery of digital video worldwide. And we have heard how advances in edge storage, server, and data center improvements from HPE are enabling the latest live, multiscreen, IP entertainment delivery models, which significantly benefit consumers and providers alike.

Thanks as well to you, our audience, for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how a video delivery and customization capability is moving to the network edge to enable end user and content provider benefits. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• Hybrid cloud ecosystem readies for impact from arrival of Microsoft Azure Stack
• The next line of defense—How new security leverages virtualization to counter sophisticated threats
• Advanced IoT systems provide analysis catalyst for the petrochemical refinery of the future
• India Smart Cities Mission shows IoT potential for improving quality of life at vast scale
• Converged IoT systems: Bringing the data center to the edge of everything
• Why effective IoT adoption is a team sport, and how to become a player
• How AI, IoT and blockchain will shake up procurement and supply chains
• Logicalis chief technologist defines the new ideology of hybrid IT
• TasmaNet ups its cloud game to deliver a regional digital services provider solution
• Converged IoT systems: Bringing the data center to the edge of everything
• IDOL-powered appliance delivers better decisions via comprehensive business information searches
• OCSL sets its sights on the Nirvana of hybrid IT—attaining the right mix of hybrid cloud for its clients