Media and entertainment, the whole enchilada. SIGGRAPH 2019 in Los Angeles has brought good news for companies involved in media and entertainment, as Azure has spun up some new cloud tools.
Microsoft has, rather.
But these new cloud-based tools and appliances are geared towards the media space, and slide right alongside the existing media services offered on the cloud platform. These include products for encoding, indexing, streaming, content protection, and content delivery.
Not to mention access to the Microsoft Azure media player.
Let’s rewind (pun always intended) a little back to what new stuff we have available now.
First off is the new Azure Render Hub. This is designed to handle the creation and management of hybrid cloud rendering environments in Azure, and the platform also integrates with existing AWS Thinkbox Deadline or PipelineFX Qube! render farms.
Microsoft has also promised support for Tractor and OpenCue very soon.
Interestingly, the new service is also adept at handles infrastructure setup and provides options for pay per use licensing and governance controls. The Azure Render Hub web app is available from GitHub, which you can get by pointing your browser to this link.
And then there is the new Azure FXT Edge Filer, which can be put to use to integrate existing network attached storage (NAS) and Azure Blog Storage using an on-premises caching appliance. It optimizes access to data in the datacenter and across a wide-area network (WAN).
Redmond is claiming that the Azure FXT Edge Filer has enough throughput and low enough latency to support large rendering workloads, and you can check out its power on display here.
And then we also have the fruits of the NVIDIA and Azure partnership, which has now led to the availability of the new NV-series virtual machines over at the cloud platform.
These VMs are backed by NVIDIA GPUs, and support remote visualization workloads and other graphics-intensive applications like it’s nobody’s business.
Microsoft says that recent technological advancements mean that the NV-series has access to larger amount of memory, support for premium disks, as well as features like hyper-threading. They also offer double the number of vCPUs compared to the previous generation.
The show must go on!
