[March 06, 2014]

Dell Drives Virtual Workstation Adoption with New Center of Excellence and Reference Architectures for Deploying ISV-Certified Workloads in Virtual Environments

Dell today 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 (News - Alert) 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's Center of Excellence for virtual desktops will be an invaluable resource for both Siemens (News - Alert) PLM Software and our customers," said Paul Brown, senior marketing director, Siemens PLM Software. "We've completed certifications of our NX software on a variety of virtual configurations helping to provide our customers with deployment options to future proof their architecture. Our customers can duplicate and test their planned configuration to confirm the hardware and software environment meets their requirements. This will be an extremely valuable resource that aids the transition to virtual desktop environments for graphically rich applications like NX."

Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations

Building on its industry leading workstations and proven 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.

Delivering on the Dell Precision promise of best-in-class certified performance and reliability, 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 Systèmes (News - Alert) 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 (News - Alert)® 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.

"Dell has a long history of delivering innovative end-to-end assets that help customers address real world IT challenges," said Charles King, president and principal analyst, Pund-IT, Inc. "Dell's Center of Excellence is yet another example of the company's high-touch engagement model. Customers can move their data and graphics-intensive applications to virtual environments with confidence due to Dell's deep institutional knowledge, expertise and proven reference architectures that are certified for leading professional software applications."

Availability

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. For additional information visit: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/dell-wyse-datacenter?c=us&l=en&s=biz.

Additional Quotes

"Design and engineer professionals are more mobile and distributed than ever before and they are working on projects with ever increasing complexity. These projects teams need the ability to access critical design data from anywhere and at any time," said Ben Cochran, Senior Architect for Platform Products. "Virtualization solutions give designers and engineers the flexibility, security and power to run sophisticated 3D design applications such as AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit or 3ds Max on virtually any device, or via a web browser. We are excited that Dell is providing a virtualization solution targeted at our professional customers."

"We have seen a keen interest from our customers in virtualized environments for increased security, streamlined manageability and end-user flexibility so we are very excited to partner with Dell to bring a solution to market to meet their needs," said Bertrand Sicot, CEO SolidWorks, Dassault Systèmes. "We've committed to certify and support configurations for virtualized 3D graphics to provide the same level of confidence and support that current SolidWorks workstations users have come to depend on."

"PTC and Dell are long-standing partners. A key focus of the partnership is to ensure that Dell system configurations undergo extensive testing and are certified on PTC Creo®," said Brian Thompson, Vice President of Product Management, CAD Segment at PTC Inc. "PTC Creo 2.0 desktop virtualization certification on the Dell Precision R7610 and Citrix XenServer 6.2 is in-process, with additional configurations in the planning stage. Our joint customers will benefit from improved performance when working with large assemblies stored on a remote server, while ensuring IP protection of the design data and streamlining administration and deployment of PTC Creo."

"Intel and Dell are partnering to open the Dell Workstation virtualization Center of Excellence, the first testing and innovation center for customers and partners to experiment, test and develop remote as well as virtualized workstation environments," said Frank Soqui, Workstation General Manager at Intel. "Additionally, we are enabling ISV-certified reference architectures, which leverage powerful multi-core Intel Xeon processors E5 v2 family and enterprise-class SSDs, enabling resources to be allocated per user and increase user productivity, to help users simplify and speed deployment of their high-end graphics and data-intensive workloads."

"Customers will enjoy rich graphics when running high-end workstation-class applications in a certified virtualized environment thanks to our work with Dell," said Ed Ellett, senior vice president of the Professional Solutions Business at NVIDIA. "With NVIDIA GRID K1 and K2 solutions in the new Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations, graphics-rich applications will have workstation-class performance and reliability from any location on almost any device, with no compromises."

"Dell's announcement of the Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence and Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations with Citrix XenDesktop raises the bar by enabling organizations to experience the remarkable performance and economic benefits of our joint graphics solutions with Dell and NVIDIA. This unique combination provides the only solution today that allows customers to efficiently share GPUs across multiple virtual machines, delivering rich media and graphic applications with exceptional performance at a significantly lower cost than standard pass-through GPU implementations," said Calvin Hsu, VP of product marketing, Desktops and Apps at Citrix.

"VMware continues to expand the productivity and mobility benefits of virtualization to new customers and industries," said Erik Frieberg, vice president, End-User Computing, VMware. "The new Dell Wyse Datacenter Virtual Workstation for VMware Horizon View provides an end-to-end solution that's reliable, secure, and simple to deploy and manage."

"Desktop Virtualization has long been gaining popularity in the enterprise as a means to securely deploy applications to users both in the office and working remotely," said Steve Lalla, GM and VP, Cloud Client Computing. "We are delighted to be working closely with our partners Citrix and VMware on extending virtualized desktops to those users requiring high performance solutions with the additional flexibility to use the tools of their job wherever and whenever they choose."

About Dell

Dell Inc. listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit www.dell.com.

PTC and Creo are trademarks or registered trademarks of PTC Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

Siemens and the Siemens logo are registered trademarks of Siemens AG (News - Alert). NX is a trademark or registered trademark of Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries.

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