OREANDA-NEWS. February 06, 2015. Global data management company Sohonet announced today that it is offering IBM (NYSE: IBM) Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform to its extensive network of film and media companies specializing in post production, visual effects (VFX), and animation. Sohonet’s customers can now directly access SoftLayer’s highly customizable and scalable cloud computing resources, available via a growing global data center network. Sohonet’s wide customer base includes leading British film studios, global media companies, and film and television productions. With SoftLayer, Sohonet addresses the challenges of moving huge digital media files through the production and post-production pipeline by offering scalable cloud computing environments to manage and store that data.

Film rendering has always been compute intensive, but the increased scale of studio film production and the ability to service concurrent projects has made it increasingly desirable for media companies to “buy in” cloud rendering when extra capacity is needed.

With IBM Cloud, Sohonet’s customers can easily scale their infrastructure based on immediate workflow needs. They can quickly spin up a mix of virtual and bare metal servers on demand and configure them as if they were their own on-premises servers. 

Additionally, Sohonet customers have the benefits of hosting multiple Web servers on a single physical server coupled with the necessary processing capability of dedicated machines, a key requirement for high I/O (input/output) workloads like film rendering.

Further, the new relationship provides Sohonet customers a competitive range of storage options, including object, block, and file type storage, which are optimized for performance, volume, backups and content delivery. All this helps media and film companies complete projects on time and on budget.

“Just as more and more businesses take advantage of cloud services, studios and production houses are equally taking advantage of scaling computing resources on demand, avoiding extra capital expenditure for resources they may only need for a few weeks,” said Benjamin Shrive, enterprise sales manager at SoftLayer.

“IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure is particularly appreciated by new customers, as SoftLayer doesn’t charge for bandwidth used for file transfer between data centers or therefore bandwidth coming onto the SoftLayer network. With provisioning taking as little as two hours, and all services accessible through SoftLayer’s single customer portal, deployment for new customers is painless,” said Shrive.

“Functionality and operational expertise is critical to our clients’ business success,” said Chuck Parker, executive chairman of Sohonet. “This unique relationship with IBM Cloud offers our customers a low-latency, high-bandwidth private network link into the most versatile and customizable of infrastructure platforms. The SoftLayer infrastructure offers the flexibility to design your environment the way you know it works best, aligning operational expenditure with incoming revenue. This allows creative teams to experiment without overinvesting on premise for peak workloads.”

SoftLayer, an IBM Company, operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. With 100,000 devices under management and a global footprint of data centers and network points of presence, SoftLayer provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service to leading-edge customers ranging from Web startups to global enterprises. SoftLayer’s modular architecture provides unparalleled performance and control, with a full-featured API and sophisticated automation controlling a flexible unified platform that seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices, and a worldwide network for secure, low-latency communications. For more information, please visit www.softlayer.com.

About Sohonet

Sohonet is the leading global expert in connectivity and data management services for the media and entertainment industry. Fully independent, with almost 20 years media expertise, Sohonet offers a range of connectivity, data management, storage and compute solutions that enable clients to manage store and transfer valuable and critical content quickly, securely and effectively - all backed up by unrivalled technical support. The Sohonet Media Network is the largest and most established private, high-performance network for the media and entertainment industry connecting the leading studios, production and post-production facilities across the globe and providing high-speed access to established and emerging cloud platforms. For further information please visit www.Sohonet.com

About IBM Cloud Computing

IBM is the global leader in open enterprise cloud enabling secure data and infrastructure integration in the cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.