Google’s latest Cloud Platform expansion is taking aim at the media and entertainment industry with a new cloud region in Los Angeles. Launching in July, the company today also announced Cloud Filestore and general availability of Transfer Appliance.
The Los Angeles cloud region — comprised of three zones — is the fifth Google Cloud Platform location in the United States, following Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina, and Virginia. At the moment, GCP has 16 other regions across 12 countries with more coming online in Hong Kong, Osaka, and Zurich.
Opening next month, Google is specifically targeting movie studios and other production houses for this expansion. Having a cloud region in close proximity helps provide “immediate access to scalable compute resources”
Productions with a lot of visual effects can require cutting-edge technology and massive, global teams of artists and animators. And with technical requirements only increasing in complexity, media and entertainment companies are continuously looking for ways to scale their resources and delight audiences—and many are moving to the cloud to do it.
Meanwhile, Google is making its Transfer Appliance for moving data to Cloud Storage generally available in the U.S. This high-capacity server fits into standard data center racks and can transfer large amounts of data to GCP. It is recommended for clients uploading more than 20TB of data, or transfers that take more than a week.
The service comes in two configurations: 100TB or 480TB of raw storage capacity. We see typical data compression rates of 2x the raw capacity. The 100TB model is priced at $300, plus express shipping (approximately $500); the 480TB model is priced at $1,800, plus shipping (approximately $900).
For workflows that require a file system interface and a shared file system, Google Cloud Filestore is launching in beta next month. This managed Network Attached Storage (NAS) service is aimed at rendering workflows that traditionally run on-premise in render farms. Google hopes to move rendering capabilities to the cloud, while allowing artists and creators to still collaborate.
When you render a movie, the rendering job typically runs across fleets (“render farms”) of compute machines, all of which mount a shared file system. Chances are you’re doing this with on-premises machines and on-premises files, but with Cloud Filestore you now have a cloud option.
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