Feature
The big picture Teradici, with its PCoIP protocol, has always targeted the most demanding users of remote workstations. Now it’s aiming even higher, delivering ultra-high image quality at 4K and 60 frames per second. Greg Corke caught up with Teradici’s Ian Main to find out more
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ith 15 million end points using its PC-over-IP (PCoIP) display protocol, Teradici has established a strong footing in high-performance virtual desktops. The company places a big emphasis on high-fidelity ‘lossless’ image quality that preserves every little detail when remotely accessing graphics-intensive applications like 3D CAD, visualisation and visual effects. The PCoIP protocol is widespread. It is used by VMware for its desktop and app virtualisation software VMware Horizon (although, more recently, VMware has developed its own called Blast Extreme). It helps Nutanix deploy workstations and virtual desktops in on-premise or hybrid cloud environments, and it can be found in the public cloud through Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Computing Services. “Our software product is available as a marketplace instance and along with reference designs, is in all three public clouds,” confirms Ian Main, Teradici’s technical marketing principal. Teradici’s PCoIP technology is also being used extensively to deliver 1:1 connections to rack workstations from Dell, Fujitsu, Boston and many others. There are plenty more doing similar for desktop workstations. More recently there has been a lot of interest in PCoIP from smaller managed service providers who are looking to provide remote solutions for their graphicshungry customers through GPUaccelerated cloud workstations. Main explains that service providers are becoming an increasingly popular choice for customers that want to outsource everything. While public cloud means firms don’t need to manage physical workstations, they still need to have some 46
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BOXX uses PCoIP experience of DevOps, he says. GPU and memory, to run applito give remote There are several service procations including Catia, ‘cloud’ access to its viders that offer PCoIP-based overclocked desktop MicroStation and AutoCAD workstations solutions to the media and enterCivil 3D. This is one of several tainment (M&E) sector, including datacentre VDI user environBeBop technologies. Main explains that ments which come under Avatara’s M&E has proved a key industry for CompleteCloud brand. “Our relationship Teradici over the years because of PCoIP’s with Teradici enables us to deliver a lossless encoding, colour accuracy, security unique solution that incorporates the and, more recently, the ability to support hardware, software, and support into a multiple monitors at 4K. “We think about per user, per month pricing model accessi80% of all remote workloads in the visual ble to businesses of all sizes,” says Rob effects industry are using either our McCormick, CEO of Avatara. Remote Workstation cards or our Cloud From silicon to software Access Software,” he says. To date, there hasn’t been as much inter- Teradici made its name using dedicated est in the AEC sector but, with the ongo- hardware for encoding and decoding. ing shift to working from home due to This includes PCIe cards that sit inside a Covid-19, this could now change. In the workstation or server and PCoIP zero clilast few months BOXX and Avatera have ents for the end points. These hardwarelaunched remote graphics services based solutions remain popular with designed specifically for CAD. many customers, but the company’s long BOXX is well known to readers of AEC term strategy is to do the encoding / Magazine for its high-performance over- decoding in software. clocked desktop workstations. Its newly From a product perspective, this startformed Cloud Services Division is now ed out with Teradici’s Workstation making those exact same machines avail- Access Software, which we reviewed in able to customers over a 1:1 remote con- 2015 and was sold by Dell, BOXX and nection via the cloud. others, but this product has since been The big value proposition here is per- discontinued and everything now comes formance. Most cloud workstation servic- under the Cloud Access Software brand. es use dedicated rack workstations, On the client side, Teradici has PCoIP which tend to feature virtualised CPUs software clients for pretty much every with lots of cores and relatively low fre- platform — Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS quencies. BOXX workstations, on the and Android. other hand, are commonly overclocked to Teradici’s first PCoIP software was 5.0GHz+, so CAD users should see a sig- single threaded so it ran on one CPU nificant performance benefit. core, and the original software encoder Cloud computing specialist Avatara is still used inside VMware Horizon. But recently launched its own range of GPU- huge improvements have been made accelerated virtual machines that use over the years and a newer version, Teradici technology. CAD users get access PCoIP Ultra, which uses Intel AVX2 to a dedicated 1:1 resource through a 1U instructions, can take advantage of mulrack mounted server with its own CPU, tiple CPU cores. According to Main, this
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