Design, Engineering and architectural professionals heavily rely on comprehensive visual computing platforms to support their workload and requirements such as CAD, 3D modelling, animation, simulation and rendering. The results are crucial for successful product developments, state of the art planning and visualization. While the IT landscape was transformed radically during the last few years, most engineers and designers are still using a decentralized standalone workstation located under their desk. At the same time, collaboration, security and mobility are required more than ever. Especially in small to medium sized businesses achieving these goals has proven to be very difficult and costly.
At HPE, we believe it’s time to transform the Engineering Workstation experience by moving it to a centralized computing solution while maintaining the performance and ease of use of a bare-metal workstation solution, enabling access to the workplace at any given time from any given location. With HPE capabilities at the Edge including Compute, Connectivity and Control, also known as the 3 Cs, centralized workstation solutions no longer have to reside in a controlled environment such as a datacentre. They can rather be deployed at the edge in an office closet or technical room. Thanks to the Edgeline pedigree, this is also true for our latest EWS offering. To find out more about HPEs edge vision and capabilities, visit the Blog of Dr. Tom Bradicich, VP and GM of Converged Servers, Edge & IoT Systems.
HPE and Citrix close collaboration enables a fast and easy deployment process avoiding on premise environment in favour of Citrix Cloud offering – this reduces deployment and configuration efforts and leads to savings from IT resource utilization.
Implementing such a solution will enable businesses to:
- Introduce leading enterprise class management (iLO) for engineering workstations
- Deploy workstations faster and more efficiently
- Storing data and intellectual property on a dedicated system locked away from possible intruders or unauthorized employees
- Allow employees to work in a flexible manor from remote locations (e.g. customer or construction site) or from home.
- Avoid project based relocation of physical workstation in offices and remote branches
- Implement new backup technologies for securing user and project data
Better together: HPE EL4000 + m710x + AMD WX 4100 = happy engineers
Leveraging HPEs proven Edgeline and Moonshot technology, EWS takes the engineering workplace to a new level by adding AMDs Radeon Pro WX 4100 professional GPU. Offering excellent graphics performance in a small footprint card makes it the perfect match to enhance the capabilities of the m710x which are already impressive:
A single m710x server cartridge provides a Intel Xeon E3 quad core CPU with a turbo boost frequency of up to 3.7GHz, making it the most powerful server ever created in this formfactor. In addition to the already impressive CPU performance, the m710x offers up to 64GB of ECC protected memory ensuring availability and uptime.
Each HPE Edgeline Converged Edge System 4000 (also known as EL4000) takes up to four HPE Moonshot m710x and up to four AMD WX 4100 GPUs, one per m710x cartridge.
With this configuration, 4 power user workstations can be hosted in a compact industrial footprint both outside and in datacentre environments and are assigned to a user on a 1:1 basis. This means that EWS is capable of hosting 4 high end CAD users in a 1U formfactor with a maximal depth of 58cm (23”), supporting deployments outside of datacenters. The solution density and footprint is unlike any other “1U rack workstation” currently available on the market.
The HPE m710x with AMD Radeon Pro WX4100 takes the Engineer workstation to the next level and adding more horsepower than the traditional HPE M710x offering with integrated Intel P580 GPU, delivering a great user experience with very high end CAD/CAM workloads, while at the same time shifting engineering workstations in a new era of work.
Support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 10 makes it easy to move from an existing workstation deployment to EWS while maintaining the same application compatibility and configuration standard as before. The Installation of the operating system is in any case baremetal, either on the local NVMe drives of the m710x or provisioned by Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS). Storage capacity of up to 8TB per user based on NVMe technology ensures that even the most complex and I/O intensive projects can be run without connecting to external storage resources. In case connection to shared or external storage is needed, bandwidth of up to 20Gb/s per workstation is possible using a various of connector standards.
Uncompromised engineering experience fuelled by Citrix
Accessing workstation from anywhere at any time has been the credo of Citrix for the last decade. Citrix has been massively successful in the workplace market and has been a Moonshot partner from day one. Therefore it’s little to no surprise that the new EWS solution will rely on Citrix technology to deliver the best possible user experience for engineers and visual professionals.
With Citrix virtual Desktops and given sufficient bandwidth / low latency, the difference between working on a remote workstation like EWS and a local workstation under the desk vanishes. This is made possible by using the Citrix HDX 3DPro protocol for video and input transmission. HDX 3DPro enables secure and fast remote 1:1 user access with support for up to 4 screens. The deployment seamlessly integrates into datacentre or edge environments helping to remove heat and noise from your desk.
Based on the former ICA protocol, HDX 3DPro offers optimal support for hardware accelerated GPU workloads just like on EWS. To find out more about Citrix HDX 3DPro, please visit the Citrix Product Documentation here.
Edge environments often don’t provide the infrastructure for all required Citrix components which are needed to make a truly flexible engineering workplace possible. Thanks to Citrix Cloud, this is no longer an obstacle when looking into deploying EWS.
Citrix Cloud Services simplifies deployment and management of Citrix technologies so you can extend existing software deployments in your own data center or completely migrate to the cloud. Deploy secure digital workplaces in hours, not weeks, and protect critical applications, desktops, and data in any environment such as the edge. To learn more about Citrix Cloud and its capabilities, visit citrix.com.
Unchain your engineers and get back control
The majority of commercial Enterprise Business Processes performance gains during the last 20 years was driven by centralization of data, process integration and real time collaboration.
Engineering process improvements in this time was falling far behind. They are still driven by highly sequential processes with check-out/check-in of large data sets across distributed teams. Engineers are physically bound to their workstations under their desk and core IP data is floating across the network.
The Engineering Workstation (EWS) by HPE and Citrix puts IT-departments in the position to support R&D and design teams with ubiquitous secure access and the process agility they need to succeed in the market.
A powerful solution provided by Citrix and HPE, two leading companies in the market, will transform your engineering workplace today!
Read more:
- Press release: HPE launches edge platform solutions accelerating business efficiency and innovation
- HPE Edgeline Engineering Workstation with AMD and Citrix Cloud
- HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems family guide
About the authors:
Cyrill Hug, located in Zurich Switzerland, is an industry professional focused on Business Development for the Converged Servers, Edge & IoT Systems at HPE. In his role he is working closely with customers to identify the best possible solution for their “edge to core to cloud” strategy. In his previous position, Cyrill was part of HPE Pointnext (Consulting) where he was responsible for planning, designing and implementing new workplace solutions at customer sites while communicating with stakeholders from both IT and business.
Cristian Cojocaru works as a solutions architect at HPE mainly focusing on end-user computing environments for enterprise customers.
