The media, entertainment, and gaming (MEG) industry is going through a major transformation to meet consumer demand for high-quality content. These organizations are looking for ways to improve production quality cost-effectively and maximize profits. Investing in IT infrastructure that is agile, scalable, efficient, and cost-effective helps content producers outpace the competition and thrive in this era of digital disruption.

Creative professionals in the MEG industry typically work on physical workstations for creating, editing, animating, and rendering 3D modeling workflows. However, physical workstations pose challenges in terms of mobile and remote staff. Working with massive 3D sets across a WAN network is challenging and can put your organization’s data security at risk. 

Another challenge is working with a globalized team of creative professionals. The projects in MEG industries often follow an iterative design approach to refine the prototypes. Collaborating over different geographical areas causes a delay in the projects. For organizations with IT budget constraints, buying and maintaining many physical workstations is not cost-effective.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) presents an opportunity for the MEG industry to address its need for greater mobility and collaboration among creative professionals. NVIDIA RTX vWS-enabled virtual workstations in a VDI environment offer performance that equals that of physical workstations. With VDI, IT teams can better align with budget targets while still focusing on innovation. In addition to the productivity gains for creative professionals, IT teams benefit from the following VDI capabilities: 

• Easy onboarding of partners and contractors
• Centralized management of workstations
• Improved security controls
• Live migration capabilities of workstations, which eliminates business disruption during maintenance activities 

The MEG industry uses many graphics-intensive applications, including Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max. These applications require both high-end CPU and GPU processing power. Many VDI platforms with GPUs used for graphics-intensive applications do not exhibit the expected performance gains due to CPU bottlenecks. For example, Autodesk Maya benefits from a high clock speed CPU core while creating, modifying, and animating 3D models. 

However, achieving a smooth and responsive experience when rotating, zooming, or panning while editing and rendering 3D models with massive datasets requires a higher frame rate in the viewport that is only achievable by using a GPU. Applications in the MEG industry require a VDI graphics acceleration solution that offers the right balance of CPU and GPU compute.

Our virtual workstation solution based on VMware Horizon 7 running on a Dell MX7000 modular platform meets these challenges. The PowerEdge MX7000 Modular Chassis, which is equipped with up to 16 NVIDIA T4 GPUs (part of the NVIDIA Tesla product line) contained in an Amulet Hotkey CoreModule, brings the balance of high-speed processors and high-performance graphics that are required for compute acceleration for virtual workstations. The Amulet Hotkey CoreModule is a unique core expansion module that brings graphics virtualization to the PowerEdge MX7000 Modular Chassis platform. Organizations in the MEG industry can now benefit from the agility, flexibility, and scalability of a modular environment along with a graphics platform that provides better CPU and GPU performance.     

Dell EMC Isilon storage, a winner of the 71st Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, is at the core of the production media workflows in the media and entertainment industry. Isilon is a key member of the Dell Technologies Media and Entertainment solution portfolio. Our customers in these industries can now use Isilon unstructured data storage with Horizon 7 virtual workstations running on a Dell EMC MX7000 modular environment to achieve the compute acceleration that is required for their graphics-intensive applications.