This whitepaper explores the visual cloud and its potential to more effectively balance cost and deployment efficiency while achieving exceptional performance.

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With visual computing workloads growing at an accelerating pace, cloud service providers (CSPs), communications service providers (CoSPs), and enterprises are rethinking the physical and virtual distribution of compute resources to more effectively balance cost and deployment efficiency while achieving exceptional performance.

Visual cloud deployments accommodate a diverse range of streaming workloads, encompassing media processing and delivery, cloud graphics, cloud gaming, media analytics, and immersive media. Contending with the onslaught of new visual workloads will require more nimble, scalable, virtualised infrastructures; the capability of shifting workloads to the network edge when appropriate; and a collection of tools, software, and hardware components to support individual use cases fluidly. Advanced network technologies and cloud architectures are essential for agile distribution of visual cloud workloads.

The impact of this media growth on cloud-based data centres will produce a burden on those CSPs, CoSPs, and enterprises that are not equipped to deal with large-scale media workloads dynamically.

Solutions to this challenge include:

Increasing flexibility and optimising processing Virtualisation and software defined infrastructure (SDI) make it easier to balance workloads on available resources. Open platforms and widely available acceleration technologies give CSPs and CoSPs a flexible way to optimise processing of diverse workloads. Learn more in the section titled Balancing Dynamic Workloads in a Cloud-Based Data Center.

Scaling compute, storage, and network resources Dynamic elasticity is a major advantage when contending with visual cloud workloads. Adopting a modern cloud infrastructure powered by a new generation of scalable processors increases resource availability substantially. Pervasive high-bandwidth and low-latency networks will also play a vital role for delivering rich user experiences and ensuring business model scalability. Learn more in the section titled TCO Considerations.

Enhancing development processes Software development tools, mediaspecific toolkits, and highly optimised software codecs support rapid application development and efficient media delivery. Learn more in the section titled Open Source Software for the Visual Cloud.

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