Virtualised and Cloud Based Graphics Deployment
By supporting virtualisation RT Software allows our customers to select from a range of infrastructure options. Virtualisation can cover many approaches, including:
- Small systems with a hypervisor manging a small number of virtual servers
- Large scale private data centre – (on-premise)
- 3rd party hosted data centre
- Public cloud deployment
In all cases, benefits can include increased management oversight of systems and their performance, which can lead to increased business efficiencies.
For broadcast customers, the adoption of IT industry approaches for server management provided efficiency benefits and has coincided with our broadcast industry’s acceleration into new IP broadcast standards and formats, such NDI and ST2110.
Hybrid solutions of SDI and IP video are still possible within a virtualised system, allowing customers to migrate to future video formats at a pace that suits them. However, if a customer is ready for change, IP video and virtualisation finally allows the broadcast industry to fully adopt generic IT platforms. In turn this lets businesses take advantage of IT industry cost efficiencies. RT Software is ready to come on this journey with you.
VMWare
By deploying VMWare vSphere Enterprise and NVIDIA Grid, you can take a bare metal server and deploy multiple virtual graphics servers running under a single management layer.
Applications for this may be as simple as providing a robust recovery strategy in the event of server failure or OS corruption of a particular system. Or you could choose to incorporate all your IT infrastructure across multiple manufacturers within a condensed, converged IT platform. Typically this will provide you a reduced physical footprint, plus reduced heat and power consumption. In addition, virtualisation brings with it additional management tools and deployment flexibility.
From RT Software’s broadcast graphics perspective, running NVIDIA Grid is a critical part of these solutions, as it allows a single GPU card to be accessed as multiple virtual GPUs (vGPU) so that multiple renderers running on different virtual servers can access the single GPU card. This is a key part of providing the efficiencies customers are looking for today.
RT Software is an accredited VMWare integrator and you will find our offering on the VMWare Solution Exchange by searching RT Software.
We would recommend a discussion with us before making a hardware purchase decision so that we can provide suitable guidance for your virtualisation project.
Private Cloud / Hosted Data Centre
RT Software has worked with a major service provider customer that has deployed their own broadcast standard private data centre, using ST2110. Their large scale IT infrastructure system is able to service several TV channels, with all the associated systems required to manage these, such as the playout automation system. In this model, all the IT equipment is still owned and operated by the broadcast service provider. They have the responsibility to manage the upgrades of hypervisor, OS, etc. But they still retain complete control over the IT infrastructure used for broadcast delivery. RT Software has been a key partner in this project, ensuring the IT infrastructure provides the correct level of performance. We are proud to have played our part in building this cutting edge broadcast system.
Provided the reference architecture supplied by RT Software is used to guide any purchase decisions, a range of IT based architectures can be deployed.
Public Cloud Deployment
RT Software’s products are software based and support virtualisation, so this opens up the option to deploy into public cloud services such as AWS (Amazon Web Services).
Here at RT Software we do this already today and use AWS Instances as training resources for our customers. As demand and interest grows we expect real world deployments will follow, so if you have a project that requires the graphics server infrastructure to be deployed in a public cloud, please let us know so we can discuss your options.
