Case Studies - Media and information services

Companies in the media and information services industry frequently respond on demand to users or have periods of high data processing activity. This makes resource utilization highly variable, somewhat unpredictable and places high emphasis on the need for flexible, efficient systems. This, coupled with increasing expectation for details and photo-realistic animation positions grid and cloud technology as an ideal infrastructure for this sector – as these case studies show.

 

 

Company: imageloop.com

Business: Free online image hosting and presentation service

Date: January 2009

With more than 20 million slideshow views per month and roughly 30.000 images added daily, Imageloop, Europe’s biggest slideshow contender, was suffering soaring operational costs. They decided to migrate from providing their own infrastructure to running 100% on Amazon AWS, using S3 for Storage and EC2 for their front end, to get a faster more flexible and more scalable service than before whilst cutting fixed costs to 2/3.

Solution Provider: Amazon AWS

Case Study provide by: Cloud Angels 

Cloud computing at imageloop.com 

 

 

Company: JDC.ltd

Business: Movie post production workflows

Grid Solution: BEinGRID

Date: June 2008

Modern motion pictures can produce up to 100 terabytes of digital picture files, currently generated by scanning film negatives. A movie will typically consist of around 2,000 shots which will go through several post-production iterations on their route to becoming artistically and technically acceptable. FilmGrid utilizes a distributed architecture where each site in a production is associated with a server holding assets required by that site. The FilmGrid client provides users with a view of the digital assets across all sites in the production.

Grid computing case study provided by IT-tude.com

FilmGrid: Grid computing in movie post production workflows

 

 

Company: Ordnance Survey

Business: Mapmakers

Grid Solution: Oracle

Date: June 2007

Ordnance Survey is the undisputed source for definitive geographic information in the United Kingdom. Since 2001, Ordnance Survey has been engaged in improving the currency and accuracy of its authoritative and widely used digital mapping of Great Britain, OS MasterMap ®. Looking for an IT infrastructure with an affordable and flexible architecture – and that, above all, was scalable - Ordnance Survey turned to Oracle to install an enterprise grid computing solution based on Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g

Grid computing case study provided by Oracle

Grid computing at Ordnance Survey

 

 

Company: R.L. Polk & Co

Business: Automotive consumer information provider

Date: January 2007

Automotive consumer information provider R.L. Polk & Co put together a Grid based on 49 Intel-based Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux to replace an ageing mainframe that couldn’t keep up. Result: The company downsized the IT department to 43% and reduced hardware costs 65%.

Grid computing case study provided by searchenterpriselinux. com

Grid Computing at R.L. Polk & Co

 

 

Company: Digital Dimension

Business: Movie visual effects

Solution provider: Digipede

Date: Sep 2006

Digital Dimension, the award-winning studio specializing in high-end visual effects, 3D animation, and motion graphics, found that growth in the business had led to a complex and unwieldy IT infrastructure: In many cases, individual graphics packages were working only through application-specific schedulers. System management had become a serious bottleneck. The answer was a Grid computing solution from Digipede, allowing greater visibility and control of the processes.

Grid computing case study provided by Digipede

Grid computing at Digital Dimensions

 

 

Company: Comic Relief (Red Nose Day)

Business: Charity

Solution provider: Oracle

Date: Sep 2005

The annual British charity event Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day includes an evening’s long TV program which presenters use to solicit donations from the audience. The donation web site usage is erratic over the evening, as presenters striking a chord with large sections of the viewers or breaks in the schedule result in massive donation peaks. As well as dealing with the largely unpredictable variations in use, the donation system must also very reliable: the event only occurs once a year and any downtime could result in millions of pounds less for charity. Consequently, it was decided to run the web site on an Oracle 10g grid-enabled database and application server software, using Sun Microsystems hardware, replicated at two separate locations for resilience.

Grid computing case study provided by www.Computing.co.uk

Grid computing at Comic Relief

 

Company: Rising Sun Pictures

Business: Movie visual effects

Solution provider: Sun

Date: June 2005

Rising Sun Pictures provides visual effects and animation services for movie industry, and was involved in the production of the film Charlotte’s Web. Working on high profile, Hollywood films, RSP needed to access large volumes of processing capacity at peak times, without increasing capital and operational costs. Their existing infrastructure was unstable and consuming large volumes of power, server rooms were short on space and overheating. To solve these problems, RSP employed a Grid Running Sun N1 Grid Engine software on 53 Sun Fire servers, 100 workstations. In addition to the required performance, this system had no single point of failure — the Grid software re-allocates jobs according to system availability.

Grid computing case study provided by Sun

Grid computing at Rising Sun Pictures

 

 

Company: School Specialty

Business: Educational Resources

Date: June 2005

Grid Solution: Polyserve

Education resources provider School Specialty redesigned their system architecture for a more flexible, fault tolerant and efficient datacenter, replacing all existing UNIX systems with enterprise Linux shared data clusters.

Grid computing case study provided by bitpipe

Grid computing at School Specialty