Dell Focuses on Virtual Workstation Adoption

ROUND ROCK, TEXAS - Dell has announced two new initiatives to support the growing use of graphics and data-intensive desktop virtualization workloads in enterprises globally: its first Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence and Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations solution.

This is the first time a major technology company has worked closely with the ISV community, on behalf of the customer, to bring validated solutions to market in the form of reference architectures that can be readily deployed and easily scaled to meet varied customer needs within virtual environments.

We are seeing a change in the way users of data and graphics intensive applications are able to securely access their data outside of the office. The idea of the fixed location-based workstation has changed as users need to be mobile and collaborate efficiently with others both within and outside of their organization, said Andy Rhodes, executive director, Dell Precision. Furthermore the notion of a 1:1 relationship between a user and a piece of hardware is going away, as an increasing number of IT managers see desktop virtualization as a viable means of providing users with a secure, manageable and resource efficient way to access their desktops and applications.

Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence

Dell's first Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence (CoE) will provide a physical location and remote access capabilities for customers, channel partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) to evaluate the benefits of running their engineering, oil and gas, media and entertainment and other 2D and 3D applications on an end-to-end virtual workstation solution.

The CoE, located in the Dell Solutions Center in Round Rock, Texas, enables customers and partners to receive expert advice from Dell professionals on how to leverage virtualized workstations and architect a solution to best suit their business demands with no fiscal outlay. ISVs are able to compatibility test and certify existing applications for virtual workstation environments, and evolve their offerings to better leverage the benefits of the new technology in this area, such as NVIDIA GRID, GPUs, which are designed for use in cloud deployments. Dell Solutions Center's established methodology will enable these capabilities and resources to be replicated into other Dell Solutions Centers worldwide.

Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations

Building on its workstations and desktop virtualization solutions, Dell is also introducing the Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations end-to-end reference architectures that help customers simplify and speed the deployment of high-performance, reliable and secure desktop virtualization running graphic and data-intensive workloads. This solution helps organizations gain workforce and IT efficiencies through secure sharing of applications and common data, rapid deployment and efficient scaling and centralized management of infrastructure.

Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations offers tested and certified configurations for workstation-class applications for Siemens PLM Software today and Autodesk, PTC Inc. and Dassault Syst mes in the coming months. Configurations optimize CPU power, memory and other considerations required for workloads. Dell also offers enhanced service and support options specifically for the workstation market, enabling a faster and simpler deployment, maintenance and support process.

The Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations can be deployed using Dell Precision R7610 rack workstations or Dell PowerEdge R720 rack servers with NVIDIA GRID K1 or K2 graphic cards on the VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop platforms. Powered by the latest Intel Xeon processors E5 v2 family featuring up to 12 cores, integrated I/O with PCIe 3.0 and AVX 2 for better data throughput and performance, resources can be allocated per user depending on their compute requirements giving them a highly configurable user experience. In addition, enterprise -class SSDs can be used to further decrease response times and increase user productivity. Users can connect via a diverse set of endpoints including desktops, laptops and tablets , Dell Precision tower and mobile workstations and Dell Wyse thin and zero clients.

The new Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations enables employees running demanding workloads to benefit not only from increased geographic flexibility through mobile access to applications, but also company BYOD programs, resulting in improved workflows, significant time savings and increased employee morale. Additionally, with a centrally hosted and managed graphics environment, IT managers are able to more efficiently deploy high end workloads and use IT resources more effectively while ensuring data integrity and efficient failover. The solution also allows users to share a centralized data set, enabling greater productivity as well as secure collaboration with third parties, as users from across the globe can remotely access the same data and applications on an as-needed basis.

The Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence is now open in the Dell Solutions Center in Round Rock, Texas, and Dell plans to open additional sites globally. The Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations solution reference architectures for VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop are available online today to customers around the world.

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