Dell Starts the Party at SXSW with Virtualization

After Dell made headlines last year for taking the publicly traded company private to allow it to innovate more freely, the company’s workstation division is having its “coming out party,” as Jeff Clark, who founded Dell’s workstation business 17 years ago called it. It’s a virtualization party, and the guest list includes the company’s software and hardware partners, as well as its customers.

The press event is taking place just a few miles up the road from Austin, where the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference begins tomorrow. At the event today, Dell announced that it is working with independent software vendors (ISVs), channel partners, virtualization software providers and its customers to move their applications from the desktop to the datacenter. The innovation comes in the knowledge of how to optimize virtualization for specific applications, so that software from Siemens, PTC, SolidWorks or Autodesk, for instance, runs as quickly as possible in a virtual environment.

To bring everyone together, Dell is creating the Dell Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence to “bring the components of the solution together,” said Executive Director, Dell Precision, Andy Rhodes, at the press event today in Round Rock, TX. “The Center of Excellence (COE) is for all of our partners to come together and move the industry forward.”

Many enterprises have moved processing power into the data center for typical office-based work. Virtualized access to the data center via low-cost clients provides cost, security and IT management benefits. Until recently, the technology was not mature enough to do the same with advanced engineering applications.

“We’ve turned the corner,” said Varjrang Parvate, director of Product Development for SolidWorks. “All of our key applications can run on a virtualized stack without losing performance.” Parvate gave a presentation at the Dell offices today in advance of the ribbon cutting that officially opened the Dell Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence.

The COE provides a physical location for Dell customers, partners and ISVs to evaluate how their own engineering applications operate in a virtual environment. Want to run Siemens NX on a low-end laptop? Test out Autodesk Inventor 2014 on a tablet? The COE is the place to do it. Of course, being a virtualized environment, customers and partners can access its capabilities remotely as well.

To help ensure its customers have a good experience with virtualization, Dell has worked with ISVs and channel partners to create reference architectures. The Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations promises to provide end-to-end reference architectures to help customers speed and simplify virtualization. These configurations optimize CPU power, memory and more for virtualizing the graphic- and data-intensive workloads that are common in engineering. Tested and certified configurations for Siemens PLM Software are available now, and Dell plans to release them for Autodesk, PTC, and Dassault Systemes software in the coming months.

Does virtualization spell the end of the high-performance workstation? No so fast.

Dell’s Rhodes says he expects workstations to be under and on desks for many years to come, but there are certain customers that he says should consider virtualization.

“How sensitive is your data? How much do you need to collaborate?” he asks. Security, collaboration and mobility are important drivers of virtualization in engineering. It’s not for everyone, but Dell says the return on investment is there for some customers. Larger enterprises and those with dispersed or mobile workforces are obvious potential beneficiaries of virtualization.

An illustration of how @Dell plans to bring integration to virtualization. #dellworkstation pic.twitter.com/4RRwks6LRc

— Desktop Engineering (@DEeditor) March 6, 2014

The COE announcement is another step toward making virtualization accepted by the engineering industry. Rhodes says he understands that the acceptance challenges are more cultural than technological. There are plenty of design engineers who won’t stand for their high-performance workstations being replaced by a thin client. The COE allows those engineers to see how virtualization works, how it can supplement their workstations, not just replace them, and how it can help them be more productive.

“No one part of virtualization makes the solution,” Rhodes says. “You have to have all of the parts come together. Each individual part being certified doesn’t provide the best experience. What Dell brings to the table is bringing all of the parts together into one solution.”

For more information, visit the Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations.