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For years now, Product Designers have been able to design true works of art in the form of innovative products and breath-taking structures with revolutionary software, such as Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS- a powerful suite of tools that provides a completely integrated design to manufacturing solutions.

But to leverage an application such as SOLIDWORKS has, historically, required a reliance on powerful workstation computers that come with a hefty cost of ownership. This cost of ownership is not only based on the price of the devices themselves, but the hours and effort required to manage and maintain the fleet of individual machines- something that has become increasingly difficult with the recent shift to working remotely.

Just as organizations have had to adapt to the requirements of a newly remote workforce, Cisco’s Unified Computing SystemTM (UCS) has worked with Dassault to test and validate the NVIDIA T4 graphic processing units (GPUs) for SOLIDWORKS. Cisco can now provide accurate sizing recommendations to power SOLIDWORKS to help ensure that customers invest what is necessary in infrastructure to meet forecasted requirements and avoid over spending on unnecessary system “headroom.” This allows customers to spend their IT budget wisely and cover other pressing needs.

By virtualizing their graphic workstations, organizations not only benefit from a reduction in their expenditures by alleviating the need for expensive individual machines, but they’re also able to reduce operational expenditures by streamlining their management and maintenance processes. Beyond that, migrating SOLIDWORKS to a virtual desktop infrastructure delivers heightened protection of intellectual property, the ability to provide in-session collaboration, and a general boost to user productivity.

But like all aspects of technology, each unique user will have varying requirements of their virtual workstation. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution when it comes to creative workloads, and virtual workstations are built with this fact in mind. A virtualized environment allows organizations to image and deploy exactly what a user needs on a case by case basis, allowing a perfect balance between the workforce and required resources.

Just as the virtual workstations can be tailored to the user, the architecture on which the virtual infrastructure is built can be tailored to the organization. Cisco documents the best practices of combining UCSTM and HyperFlexTM platforms with Pure Storage or NetApp to provide industry-leading FlashStack or FlexPod converged infrastructure offerings, delivering a proven, high-performance virtual desktop infrastructure for any business.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits virtual workstations bring to Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS, or the many options we can deliver when building your virtual desktop infrastructure, be sure to read our latest whitepaper where we take an in-depth look at the virtualization of SOLIDWORKS workloads.

 



Authors

Chris Michael

Product & Solutions Marketing Manager

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure