 "Graphic virtualization offers competitive edge in Indian manufacturing sector")
Manufacturing industry is going through an exciting phase as it progresses to play a larger role in the Indian economic landscape. Steady government measures, like Make in India initiative, are further bringing the industry to centre stage with substantial investments for local manufacturing of automobiles, handsets and so on. Simultaneously, accelerated pace of innovation, demand for shorter product development cycle and focus on bringing down the overall costs is also constantly putting pressure on the industry. Though the industry leaders foresee the Indian manufacturing industry poised to take advantage of this paradigm shift, it will be interesting to see how the industry players use technology to stay competitive in this rapidly evolving landscape.
Today, trends like globalisation, outsourcing, complex 3D designs, and a shift to a more mobile workforce are making it necessary to access critical business information anytime, anywhere. Facilitating access to all the updated data and applications (including backups, archives) for more effective version control, and change management have become the pre-requisites - especially on large projects that may involve thousands of people.
ALSO READ: Maximise returns with integrated process optimisation software
Remote users need to be ensured that they are seeing the most up-to-date versions of their project files to increase their productivity. And, as the pace of innovation further accelerates and product development cycle continues to get shorter, it is becoming absolutely imperative for the manufacturers to adopt new technologies to remain competitive.
In the past, the manufacturing sector has struggled to realise the potential of cloud computing and virtualization. While other industries have benefitted from the flexibility, manageability and security benefits delivered by a virtual IT infrastructure, the adoption of this technology approach by manufacturing has been slow. One of the key factors in this trend is the dependency of engineers and designers working in this sector on graphically demanding applications to work with huge, complex datasets. This work has previously only been possible on a high-powered local workstation, since effective virtualization of graphics was not an option.
However, with the dawn of true virtual graphics or vGPU, these barriers are being broken. The engineers and designers upon whom manufacturers rely for the core of their business offering have the opportunity to benefit from the mobility and flexibility their knowledge-worker colleagues have long enjoyed. Virtual graphics make it possible to run any application on any device, so users are no longer tied to their physical workstations.
Security and collaboration are also enhanced. For instance, a leading automobile manufacturer in Europe roughly uses 85,000 computers spread across numerous production sites to run everything from standard office applications to high-end graphics and other demanding applications. Imagine the time involved in accessing these heavy applications by vendors, remote workers and third-parties and the challenges it poses to the IT department of the ever extending enterprise. The productivity lost while each individual waits for large datasets to load to their local machines represents a huge waste of resources, while the risk of working on an old version of a file because of the time taken to update changes from other colleagues is ever present. Most worrying of all, sharing confidential files with multiple parties raises the threat of IP theft and security breaches.
ALSO READ: Streamlining projects with a modular approach
Challenges like these are addressed very effectively by next generation graphic virtualization solutions. Cloud infrastructures improve security, because information never leaves the datacenter. Simultaneously, an environment is created which allows employees, contractors, vendors, and other third parties work from whatever location is most beneficial, collaborate, and share data in a seamless way.
Another challenge faced by manufacturers is that individual workers or whole teams may need to scale up or down on a per-project basis. For example, an engineer may begin working on a project that requires the use of a different application with additional graphics processing needs. In the conventional local workstation model, after the project is finished and the worker’s next task has lower requirements, the new graphics card becomes an underutilized resource. Varying amounts of graphics power are required each day from project to project. This makes it difficult to manage the available hardware resources efficiently.
In order to counter these problems, virtualised graphics enable IT managers to create balanced environment where processing power can be deployed at need. For example, if a team of four workers are sharing a virtual graphics resource and one of them goes offline, the computing resources previous allocated to that individual would become available to the others, rather than simply sitting idle. .
The power of vGPU for manufacturing is that it makes graphics truly virtual, allowing users to run any application on any device from whatever location makes most business sense. With the power to protect sensitive data, empower collaboration and mobility, simplify IT management and allow rapid scalability to meet changing needs, virtualization is poised to revolutionise the manufacturing sector.
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Vishal Dhupar is the managing director (South Asia) of NVIDIA Graphics Pvt Ltd
Today, trends like globalisation, outsourcing, complex 3D designs, and a shift to a more mobile workforce are making it necessary to access critical business information anytime, anywhere. Facilitating access to all the updated data and applications (including backups, archives) for more effective version control, and change management have become the pre-requisites - especially on large projects that may involve thousands of people.
ALSO READ: Maximise returns with integrated process optimisation software
Remote users need to be ensured that they are seeing the most up-to-date versions of their project files to increase their productivity. And, as the pace of innovation further accelerates and product development cycle continues to get shorter, it is becoming absolutely imperative for the manufacturers to adopt new technologies to remain competitive.
In the past, the manufacturing sector has struggled to realise the potential of cloud computing and virtualization. While other industries have benefitted from the flexibility, manageability and security benefits delivered by a virtual IT infrastructure, the adoption of this technology approach by manufacturing has been slow. One of the key factors in this trend is the dependency of engineers and designers working in this sector on graphically demanding applications to work with huge, complex datasets. This work has previously only been possible on a high-powered local workstation, since effective virtualization of graphics was not an option.
However, with the dawn of true virtual graphics or vGPU, these barriers are being broken. The engineers and designers upon whom manufacturers rely for the core of their business offering have the opportunity to benefit from the mobility and flexibility their knowledge-worker colleagues have long enjoyed. Virtual graphics make it possible to run any application on any device, so users are no longer tied to their physical workstations.
Security and collaboration are also enhanced. For instance, a leading automobile manufacturer in Europe roughly uses 85,000 computers spread across numerous production sites to run everything from standard office applications to high-end graphics and other demanding applications. Imagine the time involved in accessing these heavy applications by vendors, remote workers and third-parties and the challenges it poses to the IT department of the ever extending enterprise. The productivity lost while each individual waits for large datasets to load to their local machines represents a huge waste of resources, while the risk of working on an old version of a file because of the time taken to update changes from other colleagues is ever present. Most worrying of all, sharing confidential files with multiple parties raises the threat of IP theft and security breaches.
ALSO READ: Streamlining projects with a modular approach
Challenges like these are addressed very effectively by next generation graphic virtualization solutions. Cloud infrastructures improve security, because information never leaves the datacenter. Simultaneously, an environment is created which allows employees, contractors, vendors, and other third parties work from whatever location is most beneficial, collaborate, and share data in a seamless way.
Vishal Dhupar, MD (South Asia), NVIDIA Graphics Pvt Ltd
Another challenge faced by manufacturers is that individual workers or whole teams may need to scale up or down on a per-project basis. For example, an engineer may begin working on a project that requires the use of a different application with additional graphics processing needs. In the conventional local workstation model, after the project is finished and the worker’s next task has lower requirements, the new graphics card becomes an underutilized resource. Varying amounts of graphics power are required each day from project to project. This makes it difficult to manage the available hardware resources efficiently.
In order to counter these problems, virtualised graphics enable IT managers to create balanced environment where processing power can be deployed at need. For example, if a team of four workers are sharing a virtual graphics resource and one of them goes offline, the computing resources previous allocated to that individual would become available to the others, rather than simply sitting idle. .
The power of vGPU for manufacturing is that it makes graphics truly virtual, allowing users to run any application on any device from whatever location makes most business sense. With the power to protect sensitive data, empower collaboration and mobility, simplify IT management and allow rapid scalability to meet changing needs, virtualization is poised to revolutionise the manufacturing sector.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Vishal Dhupar is the managing director (South Asia) of NVIDIA Graphics Pvt Ltd