GreenButton

GreenButton HQ has been busy these past couple of weeks as the news of our recent product release; ‘RenderMan On Demand’ spreads.

Articles focusing on ‘RenderMan on Demand’ have been featured on several leading websites and have people talking about us from all corners of the globe.

CG Society covered the news of our launch and published an insightful article saying we were sparking a “new era for RenderMan and for VFX studios”.

Read the rest of the article here

The cloud community also took notice, with several industry websites writing about the news.

IT Business Edge’s Mike Vizard spoke to Scott about the product launch. He wrote a great article that explained how ‘cloudbursting’ was leading to the creation of some new interesting business models, such as the one ‘RenderMan On Demand’ evokes. He also wrote an article earlier in Janary, after his first talk with Scott, to learn more about the company.

Read his thoughts on “RenderMan On Demand’ here

Mike’s introductory article is here

The team at mashable.com also put together an awesome short video explaining what the project is all about and what you can expect from it in the near future.

Watch the video here

Providing seamless access to cloud resources is part of our DNA at GreenButton. We are all about making it simple, user friendly and providing access to multiple clouds.

This article by John W. Verity from IT Software Community has identified GreenButton as a leader in the cloud bursting space. His article reflects on how GreenButton has taken the idea of ‘cloud bursting’ and turned it into a reality.

“Enter Greenbutton's software, which is ready to facilitate just that kind of bursting to a pre-certified cloud provider, no muss, no fuss. When the time comes, the customer can choose to pay more for the fastest turnaround or less for a slower turnaround, or something in between. Other than loading their data, there's no other configuring required.”

View the rest of the article here

We are excited to announce the launch of our new cloud rendering service in collaboration with Pixar Animation Studios. We feel very honoured to have been selected by Pixar to take their industry leading rendering software to the world.

The service is called “RenderMan On Demand” and offers nearly instantaneous burst rendering access to hundreds and even thousands of cores, enabling artists and studios to deliver the highest quality cinematic imagery with unprecedented economy and efficiency.

“From a speed and cost perspective, the cloud service is much more appealing than those we've used in the past.” Said Simon Sangar, Senior VFX Artist at Bradley and Montgomery. “The turnaround time is much faster due to the speed of RenderMan and the robustness of the GreenButton system.”

"We were investigating a private cloud solution but seeing the RenderMan solution from Pixar and GreenButton was great timing and is perfect for any of our RenderMan projects." said Darren Hyland, Head of R&D at Brown Bag Films.

Our partnership with Pixar is evidence of our leadership in the cloud market as the company of choice for software vendors looking to move to the cloud.

This service is now available on Microsoft’s Windows Azure with Linux availability following in 2012.

Read Pixar’s full press release here

Visit the “RenderMan On Demand” portal to register for the service – www.renderman-on-demand.com

We are all very excited here at GreenButton to welcome in the New Year. This year is going to be a big year for the cloud industry as IT organizations now move from cloud theory to the actual deployment of their businesses to the cloud.

We anticipate a very busy year ahead with lots of exciting stuff going on which we are looking forward to sharing with you.

For now, check out the latest cloud article on GreenButton:

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blo...-all/?cs=49426

A few days ago, the guys at Golaem http://www.golaem.com presented their amazing Crowd generating solution at Pixars' RenderMan User Group Meeting at SIGGRAPH Asia. What they also presented was their story in using the cloud to render the presentation in time for the event, as without RenderMan on demand running with GreenButton, it would not have happened in time.

Their story and timeline is wonderfully captured on slideshare or can be found on their blog.

Not only does it show how we took their job that was going to take 20 days, and processed that in less than 1 hour!! (we used 200 Eight Core machines), but also it's a great presentation as well.

This absolutely demonstrates the value of the cloud, and what we do...

We are excited to announce that we have completed incorporation of our US based subsidiary GreenButton, Inc with offices in Palo Alto, California and Seattle.

This step is critical to our continued US success and we are looking forward to growing further and securing a strong foot hold in the US market.

"Our presence in Silicon Valley and Seattle is critical to our success – both are large, diverse and highly literate technology communities." -Scott Houston, CEO.

Read the full article here

Or download the PDF here - USA GreenButton Offices.pdf

---For Immediate Release---

GREENBUTTON OPENS OFFICES IN US TO SUPPORT INCREASED DEMAND FOR CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES



Company Establishes Silicon Valley and Seattle Offices and Names Mark Canepa To Board of Directors

PALO ALTO, Calif. – December 15th, 2011 – GreenButton, a New Zealand-based software company specializing in high performance cloud computing, today announced it has officially created a separate subsidiary in the United States opening offices in Palo Alto, California and Seattle, Washington to support the expansion of its technology business in the US. Additionally, the company has announced the appointment of Mark Canepa to its board of directors.

“Our presence in Silicon Valley and Seattle is critical to our success – both are large, diverse and highly literate technology communities,” said Scott Houston, CEO of GreenButton. “This set of moves is in response to the increased demand for our services by both ISV’s and their users in the US market. We are growing organically and intend to 'follow the sun' to serve our clients better and having the US-based offices gives GreenButton the opportunity to provide ‘always on, always available’ sales and technical support to our customer base in the US.”

The GreenButtonTM platform acts as a personal supercomputer, giving software vendors, the enterprise, and end users an end-to-end solution for the cloud market. It enables the managed transition from the desktop or offline world to the online world, ensuring that both the software vendors and software user gain cloud benefits with minimal risk and effort. The GreenButton model allows ISVs to leverage their investment in high end desktop software.
GreenButton currently offers solutions for digital media rendering, oil and gas, bio- informatics, manufacturing and financial services markets. Earlier this year GreenButton was recognized as a leader in cloud computing by winning Microsoft’s “2011 Windows Azure Platform ISV Partner of the Year Award” and also New Zealand “Software Exporter of the Year” at the 2011 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards.

"Cloud computing has the potential to enable scientists and engineers to achieve greater levels of insight and innovation, by providing access to computational tools beyond what they can afford or manage internally," said Addison Snell of Intersect360 Research. "These high-performance computing users already spend over half a billion dollars per year worldwide for resources on public clouds, and we expect consumption will exceed $1 billion by 2015."
New Appointee to Board of Directors

GreenButton also announced the appointment of industry veteran, Mark Canepa, to the Board of Directors for the US subsidiary. Mark is the former chief executive officer of Extreme Networks. Prior to that position he was Executive Vice President of the Data Management Group for Sun Microsystems. He was with the company for ten years, having joined Sun in October 1996 and rising to his position as Executive Vice President five years later in 2001. He served in multiple vice president and general manager roles in the organization during his tenure at the company. Previously Mark held several general manager positions in Hewlett-Packard, including development and marketing of the firm's workstation division.

“Cloud Computing is changing the dynamics of the IT industry and GreenButton is leading the enablement of cloud applications,” said Mr. Canepa. “GreenButton is ideally positioned to accelerate the adoption of enterprise cloud computing, while simultaneously improving access to critical information. I look forward to working with GreenButton’s management team and helping them capitalize on what is a very large and growing market opportunity.”

Useful Links:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegreenbutton Twitter: https://twitter.com/GreenButton
Blog: http://forum.greenbutton.com/blog.php

About GreenButton

GreenButton, an award winning global software company that specializes in high performance cloud computing. The company provides a cloud platform for development and delivery of software and services that enables independent software vendors (ISV’s) to move to the cloud and for their users to access cloud resources. GreenButton delivers on the promise of rapid application development to enable companies to focus on application innovation rather than the software and infrastructure behind it. GreenButton abstracts high performance computing (HPC) workloads from the desktop application and runs these jobs on the Cloud at the push of a button. GreenButton is offered as both a hosted service and as a licensed platform.

ISVs and Resellers can leverage the GreenButton Partner Programs, making it easy to develop and deploy cloud business applications under any brand or identity using either the GreenButton Hosted Cloud or by deploying the GreenButton Private Cloud to dedicated or cloud servers of your choosing, or a hybrid mix.

GreenButton is Microsoft’s 2011 Global winner for Windows Azure and 2011 ISV Partner of the Year. The company is dually headquartered in Wellington New Zealand and Palo Alto, California with a sales office in Seattle, WA. For more information, please visit our website: www.greenbutton.com.

We were very excited to scoop the supreme awards last night at the New Zealand Microsoft Partner Awards.

GreenButton was voted as the winner of the BizSpark Partner of the Year and Software Exporter of the Year. Dave Fellows GreenButton’s Chief Technology Officer, received the prestigious Solutions Architect of the Year.

Download a copy of our full press release - GreenButton Press Release NZ Msft awards_Final.pdf

GreenButton’s Chief Technology Officer, Dave Fellows was honoured to be announced as this year’s Solution Architect of the Year - “It’s a great privilege and honour to be presented such a prestigious award” commented Mr. Fellows. “At GreenButton, we have a phenomenal group of people that do such amazing work and I’m extremely proud of what we’ve achieved as a company. We’re experiencing huge success on the global stage and are flying the flag for New Zealand technology innovation. The support that Microsoft has provided us has been instrumental in this success.”



BIG NIGHT: Chris Ichter from Microsoft, Viv Morresey Chief Marketing Officer from GreenButton, GreenButton developer George Pollard, GreenButton chief technology officer Dave Fellows, National MP Nikki Kaye and Microsoft New Zealand managing director Paul Muckleston

Press Release

For More Information Contact:
Vivian Morresey – Chief Marketing Officer
GreenButton Limited

BIOMATTERS & GREENBUTTON DEPLOY MPI APPLICATIONS TO WINDOWS AZURE – WORLD FIRST

AUCKLAND, New Zealand – 7th November, 2011 – Biomatters Ltd and GreenButton successfully completed the transfer of Biomatters’ MrBayes/ClustalW acceleration plugin for Geneious Pro from the outgoing Linux-based New Zealand Supercomputing Center (NZSC) to Windows Azure, becoming the first to host a commercially available service using the MPI framework on Windows Azure. The algorithms used by the plugin are based on the MPI (Message Passing Interface) protocol, which is typically used in high performance computing for scientific research.

Dave Fellows, Chief Technology Officer, GreenButton said, “We have seen a considerable speedup moving from the NZ supercomputer when running on a single 8 core node in Windows Azure. When dedicated high performance computing hardware is available on the Azure platform, we will see a significant further increase in scalability performance. One of the big advantages with this port to Windows Azure is that customers can now run as many parallel sequencing jobs as they like.”

Biomatters has collaborated with GreenButton, the 2011 Windows Azure Global Partner of the Year, to migrate the Geneious GreenButton plugin from NZSC to Azure. Quentin Christie, Chief Operating Officer, Biomatters, said, “I’m very impressed that we have managed to transfer these Linux-based algorithms to Azure so easily. Two weeks ago, we were running on the NZSC, and now, we are running on a completely new global platform … that’s pretty awesome.”

To ensure that the existing applications could continue to function as normal required Biomatters to recompile their plugin algorithms for Windows and leverage GreenButton’s software development kit to reach the Azure cloud. Mr. Christie continued to say, “Besides the rapid deployment, the migration of our plugin provides us with choice on which cloud platform provider we want to utilize. The GreenButton allows us to offer our customers additional performance capabilities as we look to expand our algorithm offerings across cloud architectures.”

-- END --

About GreenButton Limited (www.greenbutton.com)
GreenButton Limited, Microsoft’s Global winner for Windows Azure, 2011 ISV partner of the year as well as finalist in both the 2011 Bizspark, and High Performance technical computing awards. Based in Wellington New Zealand, with sales office in Seattle, Washington and Palo Alto, CA.

About Biomatters, Ltd. (www.biomatters.com)
Biomatters is a privately-held scientific software company, with offices in Newark, San Francisco and headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand.
Biomatters creates software that can be used by researchers in their daily work, including the popular Geneious Pro and Geneious Server tools. Biomatters’ technology converts raw data into meaningful, visual information, simplifying research, accelerating biological research and ultimately improving efficiency.

About Windows Azure: (www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/)
Windows Azure is the cloud-based development platform that lets you build and run applications in the cloud, launch them in minutes instead of months and code in multiple languages and technologies including .NET, Java, and PHP.

Read the PDF version here -Ref 7 - Press Release MPI on Azure - FINAL.pdf

Our recent successes as global winners at the Microsoft Global Partner Awards and our partnerships with large global ISVs have prompted a visit to GreenButton HQ from Deputy Prime Minster of New Zealand, Bill English.

Bill English has been visiting local Wellington businesses that have been going through a period of high growth and we very excited and proud to be one of them.

He dropped by our offices to see what exciting cloud computing innovations we are bringing to the global marketplace. He was very interested to meet the development team, view live demos of our GreenButton solution and discuss some of our other exciting up and coming projects.

We are excited to announce that Geneious has now been ported to the Windows Azure platform.

The new service will operate initially on Microsoft’s global platform allowing for improved and consistent performance, no matter where you are in the world.

Currently, each job is restricted to running on one set of 8 core machines. While you can run as many jobs as they want, the system is limited until early next year.
The price of the service will remain at 18c per core hour while running in restricted mode.

What Geneious users need to know:

Your username will change to the email address that you registered your GreenButton account with, but the password will need to be reset. Visit https://www.greenbutton.com/Account/ForgotPassword with the email address you signed up with, to specify your password. You will then receive an email with instructions on how to create a password.

Users will require a new version of the plugin. If automatic plugin updates are enabled in your Geneious preferences, you will be prompted to update the plugin. If you prefer to manually upgrade choose to “Uninstall” the current plugin in the preference panel, then “Install” the plugin again.

Account Balances and other general information WILL be transferred over.

Any questions can be forwarded to support@biomatters.com

The latest cloud research paper from Forrester looks at several aspects of the cloud computing industry. It explores the cloud value chain, understanding the cloud broker business model and the potential players in the cloud broker space and cloud ecosystem.

The report gives several interesting insights on the direction of the cloud market and we were very excited to be named alongside the likes of RightScale and IBM as a cloud performance management company to be watching over the next 12 months.

See below for the excerpt:

“Cloud performance management - GreenButton and RightScale provide tools to manage scaled-out applications and predict the performance and load.” - Stefan Ried, Ph.D. - Forrester.

Please follow the link below to obtain the whole paper; Cloud Broker – A new business Model Paradigm by Stefan Ried, Ph.D.

Click here

Dave Fellows our talented CTO has recently returned from Tech-Ed Australia where he wowed audiences with a live GreenButton demo and partook in several great interviews with leading technology websites.

See below for the results of his interview with Michael Lee from ZD Net:

Firm creates one cloud to compute them all - By Michael Lee, ZDNet.com.au on September 9th, 2011

What do you do when you're months out from releasing a film and the computers rendering the special effects can't handle the load? You build a new datacentre, release the billion-dollar film on time, turn the centre into a supercomputing facility and inspire the facility's operators to create an on-demand computing management company.

Just a few months out from the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the film's director Peter Jackson was reviewing some of the later scenes of the movie, which would need to be rendered. He tasked WETA Digital and its CIO, Scott Houston, who were responsible for the visual effects in the film, with ensuring that the scenes were delivered on time.

The scene in question? The battle of the Pelennor Fields.

In the scene, tens of thousands of Riders of Rohan, led by King Théoden, charge down a hill to meet hundreds of thousands of orcs in front of the city of Minas Tirith, providing a turning point in the battle. However, each of the characters in the scene were individually generated and rendered, and then placed on the virtual battlefield.

To render a single frame would have taken several days....Click here to read the rest of the article

GreenButton

Software Developer Delivers On-Demand Computing, Doubles Revenue in 18 Months

GreenButton is an on-demand high-performance computing provider that saw an opportunity to deliver scalable computing to companies that require only occasional bursts of computing power. The company developed its namesake solution on Windows Azure and worked with software vendors to add the GreenButton plug-in to applications. By using GreenButton with Windows Azure, software users can easily call on the power of cloud computing as needed. As a result of its innovation, GreenButton doubled its revenue and won the Microsoft ISV Partner of the Year Award for Windows Azure. At the same time, the solution helps small businesses like Hand Turkey Studios reduce costs while providing the ability to compete with larger companies.

Read the rest of the case study here!

We are excited to have assisted George Kim with the rendering for his short film ‘The Retrospects’ which went on to win the music and sound prize in the latest CGChallge – “Dreamscape”.

We spoke with George to find out more about his work and the inspiration behind his winning entry. We also discussed his experience of using GreenButton and how it played a major role in getting his entry in on time.

Watch his winning entry here

A little about George

My interest in CG started back in 1980’s during my teenage years. I remember making a crude–wireframes-only–3D graphics program with Apple Soft Basic and animating the results using a simple program I wrote in Assembly Language. I had learned Apple Soft Basic at a “Hagwon”–a private learning institute in South Korea–and the Assembly Language on my own through a book. I think I was still in my middle school then. I continued transporting the program to IBM PC and refining it until I found Blender 3D in my middle or late 20’s. So I have a basic understanding of what’s going on behind the computer screen when I use a 3D software package.

Although I was enrolled in the University of Maryland to major in Computer Science, I couldn’t continue the study due to other priorities.

I was eventually accepted into a branch office of an international organization where I enjoyed working as a member of its translation department for the last 15 years until recently. All the while I was also honing my skills in most aspects of 3D graphics–modelling, texturing, rigging, animating, lighting, compositing, simulations, and motion graphics. I couldn’t make myself available as a professional, though, since the contract with the organization I worked for prohibited me from taking on a second occupation.

But I was able to participate in a few CG Challenges including the “VFX402″ challenge–organized by VFXTalk.com–where I eventually won the second prize with my entry “Through the Looking Glass.” While making the entry, I was sure that the voters might have a hard time believing that I made that all on my own using just Blender. So I made time-lapse videos which virtually screen-captured the whole process. (vfxtalk.com/forum/vfx401-wip-georg-t25018.html)

I could talk about how I learned music and sound recording. But I believe that’s a totally irrelevant subject to this blog. So I think I’d better omit that.

Some people wonder how come I don’t have a Korean accent in my English. One of my friends from Minnesota said that I seem to have a Boston accent. Well, I’ve never been to Boston nor do I have a clear idea what Boston accent is. It’s just that I grew up associating with a small English-speaking community in Seoul during my teenage years, watching American TV programs aired by U.S. army stationed in Korea. I’m considered bilingual by my English-speaking friends.

I’m currently working as a freelance 3D generalist. One of my latest projects has been a number of VFX shots created for a feature film directed by Joe Eckardt at Rock On! Films.

How Did You Get the Idea for The Retrospects? How did it come about?

Just before CGSociety.org announced the start of its “CGChallenge XXVI – Dreamscape”, I had just “perfected” a technique of visualizing believable massive tsunami scenes using Blender, a task once thought possible only through certain programs. I realized that the Challenge would be a good opportunity to showcase the technique. I also got inspirations from disaster movies like 2011, The Day After Tomorrow, and Deep Impact but I wanted something that’s reassuring rather than just frightening. The dream-within-a-dream thing is from my own experience, not from the movie Inception. The original storyboarding took a few days but some of it had to be changed or omitted later to meet the deadline of the challenge or to fix some anachronism.

At what stage did you decide that you needed to offload your rendering?

Sometime during the CGChallenge XXVI it was obvious that I needed to offload my rendering to meet the deadline of the challenge, since I would not be able to use my computer at all for other task during rendering.

What made you choose GreenButton?

I was happy with the feedback that I got from GreenButton when my renders failed. The technical support team at GreenButton made sure that my renders are done correctly and successfully. I’ve used other solutions before; but I have not received any support when my renders failed on their servers. Recently, Blender 2.57 has introduced an integrated render farm service using network of Blender users. I have a deep respect for most Blender users, but I don’t think is realistic to expect that all of them–millions of them–will respect my copyrights or confidentiality.

Do you know how long it would of taken to render on your system?

I haven’t quite made an accurate estimation of it yet, but It seems that the renders would take two to three times longer than on GreenButton. My computer’s running on a Q6600 and 4 Giga bytes of RAM.

How long did it take on GreenButton?

During the extended deadline of “CGChallenge XXVI – Dreamscape”, I was able to make a 1080p version of it, offloading most of the jobs to GreenButton. I think it took about or less than 10 days.

I feel very thankful to GreenButton, without which the winning entry “The Retrospects” may not have been possible.

We are very proud and excited to be the global winner of the Windows Azure ISV Partner of the Year Award and also to be a finalist in both the BizSpark Partner of the Year and Tech & High Performance Computing Partner of the Year categories.

To read more about it check out Microsoft’s press release on the success of New Zealand companies at this years awards.

Read it here - Worldwide Partner Awards 2011 winners media release FINAL.pdf