Citrix Eyes Growth Opportunity for Virtualizing 3D CAD Apps

Citrix today announced new customer deployments of the market-leading Citrix XenDesktop® with HDX 3D Pro to deliver high-end 3D apps to designers, engineers and workers all along the product design chain. Citrix global customers, Knightec AB and Wiha Werkzeuge GmBH are using XenDesktop to securely, centrally-deliver CAD applications to dispersed design teams, with the stunning visual performance required for this type of intensive design and engineering work. Since the introduction of HDX 3D Pro graphics app acceleration technologies, Citrix has seen rapid customer adoption led by organizations across North America, Europe and Japan in heavy manufacturing, global engineering and energy sectors who have deployed XenDesktop to host and securely-deliver design and engineering applications from the datacenter.
"Supporting the CAD application market with our desktop and app virtualization solutions represents a significant growth opportunity for Citrix. Today, there are nearly 15 million CAD users that design products and another 100 million users require access to design data to view and edit these designs, representing a significant new target user base for Citrix," said Calvin Hsu, vice president of product marketing, Desktop and Apps at Citrix.
In today's global business environment, design and manufacturing organizations require the ability to collaborate and manage design lifecycles effectively with offshore, mobile and remote employees across the globe. At the same time, they have to maintain tight security and control over valuable intellectual property as the workforce becomes more mobile and distributed. XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro is the only solution that can support high-end designers, engineers and broad range of employees working with 3D data, while delivering real-time, remote collaboration. No other solution can offer the same performance, scale and graphics compatibility. Competing solutions are architected such that they cannot keep up with the latest versions of OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA and DirectX, which limits customers to certain applications and legacy products. In addition, these solutions only offer one method of GPU sharing, which does not leverage the full performance of GPU virtualization designed by graphics market leader, NVIDIA. Professional graphics applications such as CAD, visualization and analysis rely on the parallel processing power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to visually render and manipulate large data models with pixel perfect quality.
Global Organizations Virtualize CAD Apps
Knightec has a vision to become the Nordic region's leading engineering consulting firm in product and production development. The firm's 350 engineers collaborate from throughout Sweden, combining technical skill with business development expertise to create new solutions and increase profitability for its customers. Knightec is delivering product design projects faster and at a lower cost by empowering engineers to work and collaborate from anywhere using Citrix technologies. Prior to deploying XenDesktop, design data residing on local workstations was shared between engineers via email and USB thumb drives. Traditional remote access tools performed poorly with design apps, forcing users to make simple design edits only in the office.
"We needed to provide our engineers with access to powerful workstations with CAD abilities from anywhere in the world, without having to install and support CAD applications over our network. We evaluated solutions from VMware and Citrix. XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro was selected because of its better performance with our design and simulation applications and shared GPU roadmap with NVIDIA. Now engineers in any location can use their virtual desktops to access CAD applications and collaborate around project files. This also allows greater efficiency and flexibility for the firm because we can easily assign people to additional projects, working with different colleagues in many other locations," said Jörgen Norman, head of IT at Knightec.
Germany's Wiha Premium Tools is one of the world's leading manufacturers of precision hand tools for use in industry and skilled trades. With more than 850 employees that produce over 4,000 styles of precision tools, the company has manufacturing facilities in Germany, Switzerland, Poland and Vietnam to meet the demands of customers. In order to collaborate and design across these multiple locations, Wiha uses XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro technology to support remote locations securely, while enabling mobile workstyles for CAD developers. Prior to using XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro, users requiring high computing power and rapid graphics performance were provided with high-performance workstations running Siemens Solid Edge and other developer tools running locally. Recently, a new challenge emerged with plans for a new development site two hours away.
"The development of a completely independent environment would have caused high costs and considerable administrative effort, and synchronizing data regularly with the head office would have taxed the network connection enormously," Wiha IT Manager, Siegried Disch, said.
"Citrix technology opens many new options for us," explained Disch. "For example, we can recruit CAD construction specialists who live in a different city or who want to work from their home office. Freelancers and development sites abroad can also be connected simply and securely. Wherever our users work, our invaluable know-how always remains secure within our datacenter."
Industry-leading Graphics Acceleration Technologies
HDX 3D Pro in XenDesktop is a set of graphics acceleration technologies designed to deliver graphics-intensive apps and desktops using deep compression technologies that significantly reduce bandwidth requirements. HDX 3D Pro leverages server-based GPUs specifically designed for achieving the smoothest visual performance on a dedicated GPU per virtual machine basis. New NVIDIA GRID virtual GPU (vGPU) technology introduced earlier this year provides a more cost-effective solution for delivering virtualized 3D professional graphics apps by supporting more users per host without sacrificing graphics performance. Citrix XenServer® is the first hypervisor to integrate this technology from NVIDIA, and it will be available on December 16, 2013.
"Remote users can now enjoy uncompromised virtualized desktops and graphics-intensive applications," said Jeff Brown, vice president, Professional Visualization and Design business, NVIDIA. "With NVIDIA GRID vGPU virtualization  technology integrated into XenServer and XenDesktop, designers and engineers can work wherever they are, with the highest performance, stability and compatibility."