BIM and the Cloud
Chris France
CIO, Little Diversified Architectural Consulting
4. IT Infrastructure Cost Consolidation
While the genesis of Little’s cloud was to solve the BIM computing problem, it has yielded other benefits. Virtualization is another IT industry strategy that is central to building high performance clouds. Increases in hardware and network performance, coupled by a corresponding reduction in price, have made virtualization very attractive to IT leaders. Virtualization was initially justified based on hardware cost reduction. In our case, we have 57 physical servers now running on 2 physical servers ($170,000 versus $35,000). Storage is virtualized as well—we manage approximately 50 terabytes of data. Had we not virtualized our storage when we did, we would have had to add a large amount of IT staff to manage various physical data volumes. It enabled us to avoid an annual expense of $700,000. By using a combination of this sophisticated virtualization software, I wanted to see the same reductions in our laptop/desktop infrastructure.
5. Regional Office IT Infrastructure Consolidation
We recently consolidated two of our Los Angeles offices into one for better efficiency. Faced with a decision to buy a large, 2TB+ storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS), we opted instead to move our LA office “to the cloud.” With the cloud infrastructure that was in Charlotte, we had on-demand resources to accommodate this expansion of disk and consolidation of office space. This strategy has allowed the regional office to operate exclusively in the cloud with no local storage; we plan to move our other three offices to the cloud by the end of the year. Again, it is just like being in the same office—the physical location of the office does not matter.
6. General Purpose Business Applications
Sure, designers love the raw power an $8000 workstation can bring to them, but what about the rest of us? With Little’s virtualized high performance graphics workstation, this technology is affordable to all firms, in all industries, and for all applications. Imagine the productivity enhancements of running Outlook, Microsoft Office 2007, Financial, HR, or other business applications on a HPGW? Seven to ten BIM designers can work on one of these workstations. Depending on the business applications, a firm may be able to run 20-30 users on such a box. An $8000 HPGW running 30 business users costs $267/user. Isn’t that worth the productivity gained?
7. Full Mobility
How many employees work exclusively in their physical office all the time? With the consolidation of real estate leased space, more workers telecommuting from home, and more freelancers and consultants competing for jobs all over the place, people need to be able to run all their office applications anytime, anyplace, just as if they were in their office. This has been difficult up to now as people would have the applications on their laptops and their data scattered between local and remote sources. There have been improvements from the WAN accelerator companies that allow individual users access to accelerate their laptop traffic, but again, this is still not good enough. With a secure remote cloud gateway, Little’s people are able to access their HPGW which is sitting right next to their data on a gigabit LAN. Their laptop is nothing more than a cloud access device for most of their computing.
Home workers now have more options. They still need a broadband Internet connection, but instead of working on their laptop connected to their home Internet connection, they can use RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) from their laptop to access the remote high performance workstation and use its computing resources, as shown in Figure 1. This workstation, coupled with the 20 MB corporate Internet connection provides a much better and faster computing experience. This is because the HPGW is better than their laptop and the corporate Internet connection is way better than their residential broadband.
Figure 1. Using Remote Desktop Connection to work with a Revit model via the cloud computer.
Figure 2. Using a Mac to work with Revit on the cloud.
Figure 3. Accessing Revit on the cloud with an iPhone.
8. IT Automation and Support Reduction
While a cloud strategy does not change your software licensing agreements with your software vendors or the related costs, it is much easier for your IT staff to deploy and manage new applications. Many software applications have a network or concurrent licensing model. This means that anyone can work on any workstation as long as there is an available license in the pool. If everyone in the company needs access to a particular application, the traditional approach was to use sophisticated scripting or software automation to push an application to 200+ laptops. This is time consuming and problematic as it is hard to update a laptop that rarely connects to the corporate network. We can run our entire company on 20 HPGW (aka cloud computers). These 20 HPGW are stationary, located in a datacenter, and available 24x7. It is much easier for IT to update these 20 stationary computers than 200 mobile computers. Depending on the application and number of users, we will put it on one cloud computer and people just login to it when they need to run it. Problem solved.
来源：AECbytes.com
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